While many pro-life supporters were marking the 46th anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion earlier this week, the Democrat-controlled New York legislature was passing - and Democrat Gov. Andrew Cuomo was signing - a sweeping new abortion bill making the Empire State arguably the most life-hostile state in the country.
Perhaps the sickest part of the bill is its name - Reproductive Health Act - which has little health or no health benefits for a woman carrying a child and none for the child.
The new law removes abortion from the criminal code at any time of a pregnancy termination, gives permission for non-doctors such as licensed midwives, nurse practitioners and physician assistants to perform abortions, and allows health care providers to use the vague term "reasonable and good faith professional judgment" as to when to permit late-term abortions.
In essence, any licensed health care operator can perform an abortion on a woman within 24 weeks of conception, but also up until the baby's due date if the health-care operator can be persuaded to declare an abortion is "necessary to protect the patient's life or health."
Unfortunately, protecting "the patient's life or health" can have wide and very permissive parameters, according to the U.S. Supreme Court.
"The 'attending physician' - in real life, very often an abortionist with a financial stake in the decision," Ramesh Ponnuru explained in his 2006 book "The Party of Death: The Democrats, the Media, the Courts, and the Disregard for Human Life," "can always say that in his medical judgment, the abortion was necessary to preserve the woman's emotional 'health,' especially considered in light of her 'familial' situation. Any prosecution would have to be abandoned as unconstitutional. In other words: The Supreme Court has effectively forbidden any state from prohibiting abortion even in the final stages of abortion."
Once upon a time, in a country seemingly far, far away from our current one, a future New York State senator said abortions should be "safe, legal and rare." "And by rare," Hillary Clinton repeated her 1990s mantra in 2008, "I mean rare."
And while the new bill has the word "health" in it, "safe" seems to have gone the way of "rare" in the legislation.
"Planned Parenthood and other leading abortion advocates have for years claimed that abortion is health care," said Steven H. Aden, chief legal officer and general counsel of Americans United for Life. "Why then are alleged advocates of health care legalizing the removal of physicians from the operating room and allowing optional surgical procedures to be conducted without state regulatory oversight?"
Abortion, asserted Americans United For Life, are now arguably less regulated than any New York City restaurant.
By removing the procedure from the criminal code, the bill also will reduce charges against thugs like Oscar Alvarez, who was charged with abortion in the first degree after a domestic attack caused his ex-girlfriend, Livia Abreu of the Bronx, to lose her baby in 2018.
"The passing of [the Reproductive Health Act] will exonerate him from those charges," she told CBS New York. "I cannot imagine living in a world where harming or killing an unborn child is not a crime."
No worries, said state legislators. We'll just charge such people with something else. But something else that's not tantamount to murder, for sure.
Democrats have wanted to pass similar abortion bills in New York for years but have blocked by Republican majorities in the state Senate. Now the state has a Democratic governor and Democratic majorities in its upper and lower chambers.
Cuomo and other abortion supporters believe the time for expanding abortion rights is critical because he believes new members of the United States Supreme Court could reverse Roe v. Wade, even though abortions have declined nationally most every year since 1991.
"[New Justice Brett] Kavanaugh is going to reverse Roe v. Wade, I have no doubt," he said.
With that in mind, Cuomo also wants to put abortion rights on the ballot next year with the goal of having them enshrined in the state constitution.
Even without the constitutional sanction, and even with contraception widely available (and often generously supplied by the government), abortions are a frequent occurrence in New York City.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's most recent Abortion Surveillance report (2015), 544 abortions were performed in the city for 1,000 life births. In other words, more than one in three unborn babies were aborted there, and the city's abortion rate is more than half its birth rate.
The abortion rate in the state is also the highest in the country and is double the national average.
While we can't imagine such a push for the death of the unborn, we feel further disgust that the passage of the bill elicited cheers and applause in the legislature, the lighting in pink of the One World Trade Center, two bridges and another building to honor the bill's passage, and wide smiles at Cuomo's bill signing.
When can more abortions ever be something to celebrate?