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Poem’s sentimentrings true	nearly200 years later

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On Christmas, NBA shows off its best and who’s got next

<p>This week, Christians celebrate the birth of the Christ child. Whether you truly believe in the significance of that infant, or simply appreciate the transcendent beauty of what you might call a myth, the week before Christmas is filled with all kinds of light. The star that guided the wise men to Bethlehem was light. The halos above Jesus, his mother and father, were light. His existence cut through the dark night of many errant souls.</p><p>It was not, then, lost on me that what Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf did in vetoing a bill that would have banned certain forms of abortion and treated the unborn child as worthy of greater consideration was a sick sort of irony. The week that Christ is born, our governor uses his pen to deny that right to other developing children.</p><p>You might stop reading at this point, disgusted that I would use this most festive and glorious of occasions to argue against such a highly political thing as abortion. <ins>If you do, I wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year and apologize for ruining your celebrations with a dose of brutal reality. </ins></p><p>If you persist in reading, you will not find any great surprises, because regulars of this column know how I feel about the wanton destruction of the child in utero. I find it to be a barbarism, and I find those who support a woman&#8217;s right to choose such barbarism to be morally tainted. <ins>No secrets there, I&#8217;m not exactly the type of person who says live and let live when the topic is not letting babies live.</ins></p><p>But there is something more to my sadness, anger and frustration this week. I am used to the rhetoric from the so-called Pro Choice crowd<ins>,</ins><ins> which parrots the script provided to them by Planned Parenthood</ins>.</span> I hear the same inane arguments so often, I can reel them off in my sleep<ins>: my body, my choice, don&#8217;t tell me what to do with my life, women deserve autonomy, it&#8217;s a clump of cells (even though it looks suspiciously human,) I oppose abortion but wouldn&#8217;t want to force my views down anyone else&#8217;s throat, how can we know when life begins, partial birth abortions are so very rare, women don&#8217;t use abortion for birth control, fetuses can&#8217;t feel pain, whose life is it anyway, pro-lifers are really just pro-birthers, Republicans hate women</ins>.</p><p>I&#8217;ve heard it all. It&#8217;s stale, and almost comical<ins>, like a record that is played so often the grooves in the vinyl become warped and the song hurts your </ins><ins><span class="n_ 1119 v2">ears</ins>.</p><p>No, what made me particularly angry this week was the fact that Tom Wolf chose to mark Christmas by blotting out the light and giving women the nicest of all presents: the right to dismember their children, if they chose, because anything else would be &#8230; what did he call it? &#8230;	&#8220;a vile assault on women&#8217;s ability to make their own decisions about their own health care.&#8221;</p><p>I love the word &#8220;vile.&#8221; It conveys such feeling, in those four letters. You know that it denotes something toxic, repellant, dark. That&#8217;s what I think of Governor Wolf this week, the Sweeney Todd of Harrisburg, who refuses to see the unborn child as an entity of value beyond the value given to her by the mother. It is such a random thing, this desire to give deference to the mother who might wake up one morning and decide that she can&#8217;t emotionally deal with bearing a child who was the product of rape, or who might not be perfect (God forbid she might have Downs,) or who will keep her from fulfilling her dreams of being on Law Review. You might scoff at the idea that abortions would be available in those circumstances, well into the third trimester. Well, a case called Doe v. Bolton which was decided the same day as Roe v. Wade held that the &#8220;mental health&#8221; of the mother was a factor legislators should consider when drafting abortion statutes. Some &#8220;choice&#8221; advocates have argued that a woman who threatens suicide if forced to give birth should be able to have the procedure because her &#8220;health&#8221; is threatened, with health being defined as sanity.</p><p>States have fought back against these whimsical horrors. Pennsylvania has tried to do so numerous times, tightening the avenues through which a woman can destroy the life within her body (which is not the same thing as &#8220;her body.&#8221;) Some brave legislators like Nick Micciarelli of Delaware County have consistently shown their respect for unborn life. Others from our area have not, and that is something they need to square with themselves, their conception of God and their understanding of biology.</p><p>To be honest, it&#8217;s hard for me to understand how any compassionate human being could believe that the vivisection of a fetus that is less than a month, a week, a moment from being born is anything less than murder.</p><p>But the thing that truly angers me about what happened this week with the veto of SB3 is that Tom Wolf, who I will never again honor with the title &#8220;Governor,&#8221; chose to make his political statement during this holy period. I&#8217;m not saying religion should determine the scope and nature of civil law. What I am saying is that Wolf&#8217;s decision to show such rank disrespect for the pro life members of his constituency by vetoing the bill on the eve of the single most important birth in history (because Jesus was also a political figure,) is, to use his own language, a &#8220;vile assault&#8221; on human decency. </p><style>
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<div class="metaInfo"><bylineMeta><p>Christine M. Flowers</p><p>Guest Columnist</p></bylineMeta></div><div class="metaInfo"><shirttailMeta><p>Christine M. Flowers is a lawyer and columnist for the Philadelphia Daily News. Readers may send her email at <a href="mailto:cflowers1961@gmail.com">cflowers1961@gmail.com</a>.</p></shirttailMeta></div>

Their view: A terrible way to mark Christmas