Iowa family organizations oppose Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act

Baby in WombThe leadership teams of Personhood Iowa, The Family Leader, and Patriots for Christ released a joint statement Tuesday afternoon in opposition to the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act (H.R. 36) and partner legislation in the U.S. Senate.

“We’re thankful that our elected officials want to defend preborn human life, but we believe this legislation fails to meet that mission,” Personhood Iowa communications director Rebekah Maxwell said. “Our legislators need to know that this bill contains troubling contradictions that keep us from supporting it and, we believe, keep it from being a “prolife vote.”

 

The text of the joint statement follows:

No person shall be deprived of their inalienable (God-given) right to life, without due process and equal protection of the law. Therefore, we applaud legislative efforts to end the practice of child-killing in America. However, we should never willingly sacrifice certain innocent children in order to save others.

The Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act does not “save as many as we can.” This bill specifically, and intentionally, fails to protect children conceived in rape or incest. Classifying those babies as “exceptions” degrades thousands of Americans so conceived as second-class citizens, unworthy of life.

Such open discrimination violates both the Fifth and Fourteenth amendments, and the very principle we seek to establish: that every innocent person has the right to life, regardless of sex or size, skin color or circumstance of conception.

Laws that protect innocent life are desperately needed. But this law, that explicitly sacrifices certain innocent lives in the guise of protecting life, is both legally and morally deficient.

 

We urge our representatives not to support such a contradiction, and instead work to protect every innocent person’s inalienable right to life.