LITTLE ROCK, AR (Catholic Online) - The people of Arkansas earned a place in future history books this week. They will be mentioned in the recounting of the great human rights movement of our age, the struggle to restore the Fundamental Human Right to Life to children in the womb. We all once lived in a womb. It is the first home of the whole human race. The children in the womb of their mother are our youngest neighbors. It is always and everywhere wrong to take the life of an innocent neighbor. We all know it. 

Arkansas State Senate Bill 134, "To Create the Arkansas Human Heartbeat Protection Act; To Protect Unborn Children", survived the veto pen of an Anti-Life Democratic Governor named Mike Beebe on Monday. He claimed it violated the Supreme Court's 1973 Roe v. Wade decision. That decision manufactured out of whole cloth a sort of floating viability standard to determine when a child is to be protected against being killed in the womb.

The governor said that the legislation, "would impose a ban on a woman's right to choose an elective, nontherapeutic abortion well before viability." He argued that "Senate Bill 134 blatantly contradicts the United States Constitution, as interpreted by the Supreme Court." Finally, he tried to sound noble by adding, "When I was sworn in as governor I took an oath to preserve, protect, and defend both the Arkansas Constitution and the Constitution of the United States. I take that oath seriously." Of course, that does not include defending the first Right, the Right to Life.

The Governor tried twice to override the will of the people. Last week, he vetoed legislation which banned abortions after twenty weeks.  Then he vetoed the Fetal Heartbeat legislation.  He simply denies the truth that every child in the womb has an inalienable Right to Life and tries to make such a position seem honorable. It is not. Both the Arkansas State House and Senate, representing the people of Arkansas, upheld the truth and bravely voted to override the both of the Governor's vetoes.

The heartbeat law requires that a woman considering taking the life of her son or daughter in her womb through a procured abortion first receive a simple test to detect the heartbeat of her son or daughter. If there is a heartbeat, the child gets to live and cannot be killed by a procured abortion. With this legislation the people of Arkansas have lent their voice to our littlest neighbors because theirs is muffled behind the wall of their mother's womb.

There, in their first experience of the interdependency which reveals the truth about our humanity, where they are supposed to be embraced by the warmth of love and experience safety, they are vulnerable to the worst kind of domestic violence. At any moment the weapons used in the first pre-emptive war called legal abortion may be wielded against them for any reason.

We need to be honest. There are brutal weapons of death and destruction - chemical, surgical or suction - being used to kill these children deliberately for any or no reason. The cold, hard truth about every procured abortion is that it takes an innocent human life. No matter how hard the opponents try through their Orwellian newspeak to hide the truth, every procured abortion is the taking of an innocent human life.  

No one with any integrity any longer argues that the little girl or little boy killed through procured abortion is not a human being. When the abortion occurs through miscarriage we properly enter into the mourning of the mother over the loss of the one we call "her baby". However, when the mother is deceived into having a voluntary abortion, anti-life zealots use a different vocabulary.

Most people now acknowledge that these children killed by abortion are human persons. A few hold on to the dangerous notion that dependency upon others makes someone less of a person. However, medical science has confirmed what our consciences and the Natural Law told us all along, these victims of the first preemptive war on the womb called intentional abortion are human beings just like us.

We frame baby's first pictures in their 3D or 4D image through sonogram technology. We use intrauterine surgery to intervene to save them or correct anything which they may need before they are born through medical assistance. We prosecute an offender who, in the evil act of harming their mother, causes their death as well. It is all so very clear what we are really doing in every procured abortion.

The argument now used most often to try to justify killing little girls and boys in the womb by procured abortion is that the choice to kill them should be left to the mother in consultation with her own Doctor and/or other counselors. This profane argument is couched in a language of freedom and choice when the choice to take innocent life is always wrong and never leads to freedom. It is also  clothed in a counterfeit claim of compassion.The root of compassion means to suffer with, not cause suffering. What other group of human persons can be killed because someone else determines they do not want them to live?

There is no moral difference between the killing of a child after birth and the killing of a child before birth. We excuse fetal homicide when it is committed by a misguided mother through the agency of a deceived or corrupted Doctor who once pledged to "do no harm" in his or her professional oath. We also refer to this intentional taking of innocent human life as healthcare. We even try to claim that the decision to take their life is somehow a reproductive choice.

Procured abortion is not health care, it is the killing of a child in the womb. There is absolutely nothing reproductive about it. The legislation passed by the lawmakers in Arkansas, led by Arkansas State Sen. Jason Rapert, is a step along the inevitable road to restoring the fundamental Human Right to Life for children in the womb.