WASHINGTON – When author Mark Childress penned “Crazy in Alabama,” he wasn’t just whistling Dixie.
“I haven’t been quoted this much since Roy Moore,” Childress recently told me, referring to last week’s coverage of Alabama’s passage of a law banning abortion in nearly all circumstances. Moore, of course, was an Alabama U.S. Senate candidate who lost a 2017 race after accusations surfaced of past inappropriate sexual conduct with underage girls..
So, is Alabama really crazy? Is Georgia, which recently passed a “heartbeat bill” banning abortion after the baby’s heartbeat can be detected, usually at around six weeks? Lest I be chastened for daring humanize an embryo, let me state for the record that the correct term for “heartbeat” is “fetal pole cardiac activity,” because at six weeks, said embryo doesn’t have a cardiovascular system and, therefore, no fully-formed, beating heart.
Is Alabama crazier than New York, where some protections for babies “born” alive during an abortion were recently eliminated, making it easier to end their life if desired by the abortion seeker?
Is Alabama crazier than Virginia, where Democratic Gov. Ralph Northam seemed to support infanticide back in January when commenting on a proposed bill that would relax some of the state’s abortion restrictions? In a radio interview, he said that in cases where a mother goes into labor with a late-term fetus that has “severe deformities there may be a fetus that’s not viable the infant would be resuscitated if that’s what the mother and the family desired. And then a discussion would ensue between the physicians and the mother.”