ARTL Supporting Louisiana Personhood Bill

For immediate release (see also in Charisma Magazine's LA Personhood story):

Louisiana's HB 645 Will Protect All Human Beings
ARTL urges support of Rep. LaBruzzo's Personhood Bill

June 8, 2011 UPDATE: The Louisiana Personhood Bill was killed yesterday by opposition including from anti-personhood pro-life organizations. "Opposition to our 2011 Personhood bill came from Louisiana's National Right To Life affiliate, the state's Catholic Bishops, and the state's Focus on the Family affiliate," said the bill's sponsor, Rep. John LaBruzzo. "And the personhood oppositon to HB 645, of course, also came from Planned Parenthood and the ACLU."

The HB 645 pro-life opposition came from attorneys and other representatives of the Louisiana Family Forum, Louisiana Right To Life, the Louisiana's Roman Catholic Church. Regardless of all this, because personhood is based on the God-given right to life of every child and the truth will win as the personhood movement continues to march across the land. So some day, ARTL will say to these groups, "Welcome aboard!"

Feb. 2, 2016 Update: In a Denver radio interview, Juda Myers of Choices4Life.org confirmed that she spoke with representatives of the organizations above which were named by Rep. LaBruzzo, including for example Benjamin Clapper of the misnamed Louisiana Right To Life, and that they all worked to kill this pro-life bill because it had no "exceptions" and she reported on a $5,000 fundraiser designed to raise the funds to lobby to kill this no-exceptions anti-aboriton bill.

New Orleans, LA 6-7-11 – American Right To Life thanks Louisiana's Rep. John LaBruzzo for his courage to make Louisiana the first state in the nation to protect all innocent human beings from being intentionally killed by recognizing the Right to Life for all persons, regardless of age, size or dependency.

"The proposed law HB 645, would protect the right to life of unborn children from fertilization," said Joe Riccobono, ARTL's Louisiana spokesman. "It defines feticide as the killing of an unborn child whether surgically or by a lethal drug," said Riccobono, who as a temporary Katrina transplant to Denver played a leading role in Colorado's statewide personhood amendment campaigns in 2008 and 2010.

Despite the state's many abortion regulations, nearly 100,000 Louisiana children have been killed by surgical abortion in the last decade and the rate of loss of children may actually be increasing due to the proliferation of chemical abortifacients. This is consistent with the nationwide trend in which pro-lifers have passed hundreds of abortion "regulations," yet the pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute reports that neither the total number of abortions nor the rate of abortions have decreased in the last decade. Our research at AmericanRTL.org/abortion-regs-dont-work shows that abortions have only "appeared" to decrease in number whereas they have actually increased, including by chemical abortifacients.

Testifying for an earlier version of Rep. LaBruzzo's bill, Dr. W.A. Krotoski, having taught at LSU and Tulane, stated, "From the moment of fertilization, we have all been human.  Simply stated, we are all in a virtually seamless process of growth and development; and we are each truly unique, possessing individually-specific DNA – and personhood."  Dr. Krotoski even notes that a human individual exists for about five days before implanting in the mother’s womb. During this time the baby makes its first cry to the mother, by a pheromone, asking her to get ready to feed the little one. ARTL urges all Louisiana state representatives today to approve the sponsor's amendments and to pass HB 625.

A recent Gallup survey shows that, "More Americans are pro-life than pro-choice" and unintentionally documents the progress since the modern personhood movement began in 2007 (and with bills like HB 645), that the pro-life ranks are swelling in a powerful way. The recent decrease among those who think all abortion should be legal is matched by the increase among those who think all abortion should be illegal. "Personhood is where the progress is being made, not in the muddy middle," said Riccobono.

LaBruzzo's bill would recover what has been lost from the original Hippocratic Oath dating back to Ancient Greece. Lolita Hanks, president of American Right to Life, says, "Louisiana has the chance to stop discrimination against the smallest and youngest citizens in America by voting yes on HB 645. Personhood is a legal status all Americans take for granted yet the unborn are denied it. Now is the time to do what is right, for our own humanity and future generations."

Not surprisingly, Republican opponents and others are using the compromised federal "Hyde Amendment" as a threat toward killing HB 625. Similar to the Rebulican Roe v. Wade court using Texas "exceptions" to undermine their state's anti-abortion law (arguing that even Texas' own law clearly did not regard the fetus as a person because it allowed the killing of some unborn children), oppoenents claimed that HB 625 would violoate the Hyde Amendment, legislation designed to prevent funding of abortion, yet as modified in 1993, affirms appropriations for some abortions including for rape and incest (see text below). The Legislative Fiscal Office in Baton Rouge asked the federal government to provide an opinion on what effect passage of a personhood bill would have on the state of Louisiana. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services responded that, because they interpret the Hyde Amendment as requiring the funding of some abortions, that Louisiana would lose their entire $5 billion dollars in annual federal Medicaid funding. A lesson learned from Texas and now Lousiana is that abortion regulations, including all "pro-life" bills that end with, "and then you can kill the baby," predictably backfire and easily result in the killing of far more children than would otherwise have been killed if pro-lifers had not decided to compromise on God's enduring command, "Do not murder."

Inspite of all the opposition to honoring God and protecting the inncoent, there is a growing number of pro-family organizations, religious leaders, and legal experts supporting personhood that can be seen on the "Advocates" page at Georgia Right To Life's personhood.net. The personhood advocates include Dr. Charles Rice, professor emeritus of Notre Dame School of Law, who wrote, "There is nothing in the decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States which conclusively forbids [any state] to define and protect the rights of the unborn child beyond the extent to which those rights are recognized and protected under the United States Constitution."

NOTE: The Hyde Amendment as worded since 1993 reads, "None of the funds appropriated under this Act shall be expended for any abortion except when it is made known to the federal entity or official to which funds are appropriated under this Act that such procedure is necessary to save the life of the mother or that the pregnancy is the result of an act of rape or incest."