Ohio Governor Mike DeWine (R) recently signed a bill that requires women to either bury or cremate children who have been aborted.
Signed on Wednesday, the law states that a “pregnant woman is responsible for the costs related to the final disposition of the fetal remains at the chosen location.”
If cremation is chosen, the slain child must still afterward be placed in a “grave, crypt, or niche” or at least “scattered [in] a dignified manner,” according to the new policy.
The law makes clear that the government will not pick up the tab for the burial expenses, stating that “the pregnant woman is responsible for the costs related to the final disposition of the fetal remains at the chosen location.”
The measure also comes with some teeth as far as enforcement. Those who fail to meet the requirements laid out in the bill are subject to a “misdemeanor of the first degree.”
As expected, Planned Parenthood lashed out at DeWine’s signing of the legislation.
“This is honestly just a familiar ploy by these lawmakers who use the chaos of the end of year session to try and pass these unpopular bills,” Laurel Powell of Planned Parenthood Advocates of Ohio told local ABC affiliate News 5. “Studies have repeatedly shown that the majority of Ohioans support access to safe and legal abortion care.”
Molly Smith with the Right to Life Action Coalition of Ohio lauded the new law.
“Although we work for a day when no unborn child in Ohio is killed by abortion, we recognize that, at the very least, accounting for those precious bodies, and for their humane disposition is necessary,” she said in a statement.
Another abortion-related bill is currently on Governor DeWine’s desk. If signed, it would ban doctors and women from using telemedicine when conducting a medical abortion. Doctors found in violation of this law would face criminal charges.
As Smith said, although the ideal would be for the heartless slaughter of unborn children to be ended entirely, the latest legislation to be signed by Ohio’s governor is an important step in the right direction.
On the moral and cultural levels, it restores public recognition of the unborn child’s dignity of life, which is crucial to prepare the public to accept further restrictions on abortion down the road. Culturally, pro-life measures will fail if there is not first a widespread public consciousness about the value of life.
The new requirements also make abortion more onerous for women and thereby reduce the likelihood that they will go through with it. By placing the burden on women to pay for the burial or cremation expenses out of their own pocket, some of them might think twice.
After all, the abortion lobby has always played on the convenience angle: “Get an abortion! It’ll make things so much easier so you can continue ‘enjoying’ life without the burden of motherhood!” The more abortion is made to be inconvenient, the less it will appeal to prospective mothers, especially in the low-income minority communities that Planned Parenthood loves to target.
After all, there are some women who will always do all they can to obtain an abortion because they believe so passionately in the warped of morality sacrificing their own children on the altar of hedonistic libertinism.
But in many minority communities, women are prone to having a more conservative view of motherhood and family and are often convinced into killing their own children by manipulative abortionists who play to their economic insecurities. Make abortion expensive, and the moral considerations will overpower the economic ones for such women.
The DeWine-signed bill is important for another reason: It includes penalties for abortion-choosing mothers. Not directly, of course, but in the form of misdemeanor charges if they fail to bury or cremate their children in a dignified way.
For far too long, the illogical dogma on abortion among many conservatives, which has allowed it to grow, has been that the mothers to choose to kill their unborn offspring should not face consequences; only the abortionists who perform the slaying should.
If we would clearly charge a woman for murder if she paid someone to kill her newborn baby, why not for a woman who pays someone to kill her unborn one? The absence of legal consequences for mothers is the lack of teeth which hinders a decisive crack-down on the barbaric practice.
Ohio’s new bill moves the Overton Window to the right, paving the way in the culture and in public opinion for future penalties for complicit mothers.
