On October 22, 2025, the Pennsylvania “House of Representatives’ Judiciary Committee approved and reported out of committee a proposed amendment to the Pennsylvania Constitution that would allow abortions to be performed up to the birth of the unborn child.” The amendment states,
Every individual has the fundamental right to exercise personal reproductive liberty and make and effectuate decisions regarding the individual’s own reproduction, including the ability to choose or refuse to prevent, continue or end the individual’s pregnancy.
During a committee hearing on the amendment, State Rep. Stephanie Borowicz asked the amendment’s chief sponsor, Danielle Friel Otten,
This amendment allows the “termination of a pregnancy.” What is being terminated?
In her reply, Otten revealed either that she is stupid or dishonest:
I guess I’m not understanding your question. This is not a decision on behalf of the government to terminate anything. This is a decision on behalf of the people of Pennsylvania to uphold a woman’s right to her own decisions about her own body and how her body will be used.
Borowicz didn’t ask who is doing the terminating.
Framed slightly differently, she was asking specifically what is terminated when a pregnancy is prematurely ended by chemical or surgical interventions. Borowicz was trying to get Otten to cease with the euphemistic, cowardly, political rhetoric and speak in plain language. To “terminate a pregnancy” requires the intentional killing of a living human. See, that’s not so hard.
Otten not only ignores the fact that there are two bodies, but she also expresses the noxious idea that developing humans in their mothers’ wombs—humans that had no choice in their creation—are “using” their mothers’ bodies when being nourished.
Borowicz makes clear the scientific and moral reality Otten seeks to elide:
The baby’s body is not the mother’s body. So, you can’t tell me what we’re terminating all the way till birth? … What is being terminated in that pregnancy?
After an interruption by lefty committee chairman Tim Briggs, who evidently prohibited Borowicz from showing models of a 12-week fetus, a 16-18-week fetus and a 26-week post-viability baby—which snide Briggs called “props”—Borowicz continued:
Which ones are we willing to protect today? An eagle egg—which we all want protected, right? … Sadly, eagle eggs have more protection than an unborn child created in the image of God. Look at their hands, look at their feet … perfectly formed in the womb by our Creator. … There is a complete disregard for human life and the understanding that all human life has value. That baby has unique DNA … and unique fingerprints. … There’s two bodies, two heartbeats, and two lives. … Who’s going to be a voice for them?
In Illinois, it’s legal to kill humans in the womb for any or no reason up to “fetal viability,” which is not specified in the law but is presumed to be between 24-26 weeks. After that, abortion is permitted up until birth for “mental health” reasons, which again are not specified in the law. All a woman need do is find a pro-feticide physician to declare that allowing a 24-week-old human to live will compromise a woman’s “mental health” and presto change-o a live human is unalived by a morally dead “doctor.”
But if you’re feeling all feticide-y, don’t go around destroying the fertilized eggs of robins, cardinals, bluebirds, geese, ducks, hawks, falcons, owls, ospreys, vultures, or eagles anywhere in the country. Those killings are illegal.
If you kill the eggs of a robin, you will face up to $15,000 in fines, six months in jail, or both. If you destroy the eggs of an eagle anywhere in the country, you face up to $100,000 in fines, one year in prison, or both.
Kill a seven-pound fertilized human egg the day before his or her birth in Illinois (and soon perhaps in Pennsylvania), and you will be celebrated. If you’re the killer, you will be paid.
Years ago, I attended a debate on abortion between Baylor philosophy professor Francis Beckwith and Northwestern University law professor Andrew Koppelman. Koppelman echoed Hillary Clinton’s dishonest claim that she wanted abortion to be “safe, legal, and rare.“ During the Q & A, I asked Koppelman why abortion should be rare if incipient human life is so devoid of personhood as to be undeserving of even minimal constitutional protection. He nervously mumbled some nonsense about hitting a squirrel with his car.
This is the kind of moral reasoning leftists have to offer. They know the product of conception between two humans is a human, so they have to argue that, although it’s human, it’s not a person. When asked what determines personhood, they can’t name a single characteristic that doesn’t apply to humans outside the womb as well.
Leftists like Otten focus their occluded eyes on the right of women to “control their reproduction.” But that leads to another question they would surely detest: If the reproductive rights of a woman come into direct conflict with another human’s right to live, which is a right of a higher moral order?
Otten resorted to the rhetorical dodge regarding the precise meaning of “pregnancy termination” in order to avoid admitting that the termination of a pregnancy begins and ends with snuffing out the life of a tiny, defenseless human—a growing life even more vulnerable and valuable than that of a baby robin.
Does anyone really believe leftists will stop at feticide? What’s the moral difference between birth minus one day and birth plus one day.
Uber-radical feminist Sophie Lewis opposes the longstanding strategy of pro-choice advocates to dodge the truth as Otten does. Lewis wants women to embrace openly that abortion is killing and, in her view, that such killings are good:
So, why not risk coming out for what we actually want, namely, abortion—a clearly documented public good? … Rather than cleave in desperation to the rearguard missions of defending the rights (to privacy, rather than abortion) enshrined in Roe v. Wade, we could … reset the terms on which abortion is fought.
What would it mean to acknowledge that a death is involved in an abortion? Above all, it would allow for a fairer fight against the proponents of forced gestating. When “pro-life” forces agitate against feticide on the basis that it is killing, pro-abortion feminists should be able to acknowledge, without shame, that yes, of course it is. When we withdraw from gestating, we stop the life of the product of our gestational labor. And it’s a good thing we do.
In a video six years ago, feticidal maniac Lewis said,
Abortion is … a form of killing. It’ s a form of killing that we need to be able to defend. I am not interested in where a human life starts to exist. …
[L]ooking at the biology of this kind of hemochorial placentation helps me think about the violence, that, innocently, a fetus metes out vis-a-vis a gestator. And that violence is an unacceptable violence for someone who does not want to do gestational work. The violence that the gestator metes out to essentially go on strike, or exit that workplace, is an acceptable violence.
As I wrote at the time,
“Hemachorial placentation” is a $10 technical term that refers to the natural process by which a mother’s body sustains her developing offspring by bathing his or her chorion (outer layer of tissue enveloping the baby) in nutrient-rich blood (hemo) via the placenta (placentation).
Hemachorial placentation doesn’t mete out violence—innocently or otherwise—unless, of course, “violence” is redefined to include non-violent, natural processes. Lewis needs to redefine this natural process as violence in order to justify the actual violence mothers and their hired killers mete out to humans in the womb—humans that have no part in nor cause the alleged “violence” of “hemochorial placentation.”
This is what conservatives are up against. Never underestimate the depths of moral depravity to which leftists have sunk. And be prepared to speak truth no matter the personal cost.