This past week, Amanda Prestigiacomo of The Daily Wire reported on the signing of the “fetal heartbeat” bill into law by the Governor of Ohio, Mike DeWine. As a wonderful next move for the pro-life movement, the new law is intended to protect unborn babies with beating hearts from being aborted. Unborn babies’ heart beats are detectable after approximately six weeks of gestation.

As Prestigiacomo reported, a handful of states have passed such bills, including Mississippi and Georgia. And just to the south of Ohio, the Kentucky state legislature passed SB 9, and Governor Bevin signed into law the Commonwealth’s own “fetal heartbeat” bill. As summed up by a report from the Catholic Conference of Kentucky, the legislature passed several pro-life-related bills before wrapping up their session. One bill anticipates the overturning of Roe v. Wade to provide significant legal protection to the unborn. Another prohibits abortion on the basis of sex, race, or physical disability.

Needless to say, these new laws will face challenges in court, and the governors and state legislatures passing these laws were well aware of this. Planned Parenthood and the ACLU have already vowed they will fight Ohio’s new law, which was vetoed twice in the past by former Ohio Governor Kasich. The former governor, who identifies as being pro-life, reasoned that Ohio taxpayers would have to foot the legal bills for the inevitable court challenges to it. I posit that this kind of defeatist thinking keeps the status quo.

Of course, as with any worthy battle, we must first marshal our resources to determine if winning is possible. No state or organization has unlimited resources and must first determine how best to use them. But we must also realize that our opponents also have the same constraints. Planned Parenthood and the ACLU, while certainly well-funded, do not have unlimited resources at their disposal either.

With this in mind, if we take Governor Kasich at his word that he’s pro-life, I would ask the former governor and anyone who argues similarly these questions:

If our cause is just, shouldn’t we pursue it?

If we have sufficient resources, should not we use them in this just cause?

Where else in the practice of governing do we not do something simply because it will cost money?

If we are truly against abortion and we do nothing because of a possible challenge, what good is it to say we are pro-life? Why do we bother fighting at all?

If the government is to spend the taxpayers’ money, what better way to spend it than to defend the lives of our citizens in the courts?

Quite frankly, this do-nothing argument with its sense of resignation and defeat keeps the abortion mills running. We do not need “pro-life” governors like former Governor Kasich—we need governors who are willing to fight for the unborn, even at a cost to themselves and the state. I want to thank personally the governors of Ohio, Kentucky, Mississippi and Georgia for their leadership in this, the most important cause of all—the protection of human life itself.

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See Alec Ott’s previous posts in this ongoing series on the Pro-Life Movement and Culture:

Part 1: Apathy Over the Killing of Infants

Part 2: An Unplanned Conversion of the Heart

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Photo by geralt (Pixabay)