FreeTheBan-600
By Cheryl Sullenger
Washington, DC — Pro-life leaders will once again hold a protest at the office of House Speaker John Boehner on May 7, urging the passage of the Pain Capable Unborn Child Protection ordinance.
Bud Shaver, Executive Director of Protest ABQ and Apostle Manny Lardizabal, New Mexico Heartland Apostolic Prayer Network (HAPN) State Leader, will stand in solidarity with national pro-life leaders to call upon House Speaker John Boehner to reschedule a vote to ban all abortions after 20 weeks.
The abortion of babies in the latest stages of pregnancy is an issue that strikes home with these men. They live in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where the largest late-term abortion clinic, Southwestern Women’s Options operates. There, women from all 50 states and even a few foreign countries receive abortions into their ninth month of pregnancy. These are abortions done on babies capable of not only feeling pain, but also of surviving outside the womb if birthed.
Shaver has worked to expose the horrific truth of these late-term abortions since moving to Albuquerque in 2010 after an internship with Operation Rescue in Wichita, Kansas. His wife, Tara, was able to document over a dozen abortion-related medical emergencies at Southwestern Women’s Options by obtaining public 911 records. So powerful were the accounts of botched abortions and other life-threatening abortion complications, that eventually the City of Albuquerque changed their policy and stopped releasing the files.

On January 22, 2015, the House unexpectedly pulled a promised debate and vote on the Pain Capable Unborn Child Protection Act after a group of Republican Congresswomen led by Rene Ellmers objected to a provision that would have required women seeking abortions after rape to have reported the incident to the police. House leaders promised to reschedule the vote soon.
Now, four months later, hammering out new language that is acceptable to all parties appears to be the excuse for delay.
“Four months is plenty of time to craft a couple of sentences. If Boehner thinks no one is watching, it could be months before this bill goes to a vote – if ever,” said Newman. “We must keep reminding Congress that people are watching and that we expect them to keep their promises. Every day of delay on this humanitarian measure means that more babies will be essentially tortured and killed unnecessarily through the most barbaric of abortion procedures. This is unacceptable.”
The late-term abortion process employed by most abortionists today is a modified version of the now-illegal Partial Birth Abortion method that is generally reviled as barbaric and inhumane. The modified version was developed by George Tiller at his infamous late-term abortion clinic in Wichita, Kansas. It involves injecting the living baby through the wall of the woman’s abdomen with an outdated heart drug called Digoxin, which is mean to stop the baby’s heart prior to inducing labor.
But Digoxin does not always work. Literature on the subject of the efficacy of Digoxin injections to accomplish “fetal demise” indicate that the injections fail about 13% of the time even under the best circumstances, and if the drug is injected into the amniotic sac instead of the fetus, the failure rate on the first try can be as astronomically high as 70 percent. Dr. Karen Feisullin, a practicing ObGyn at a Philadelphia hospital testified during the trial of Kermit Gosnell earlier this year that Digoxin injections can take up to 24 hours for Digoxin to actually kill a pre-born baby, depending where the injection is made.
This means sometimes the babies are born alive. In 2013, Philadelphia abortionist Kermit Gosnell was convicted on 3 counts of First Degree Murder for intentionally killing babies born alive during abortions that the Pain Capable Unborn Child Protection laws would ban.
During a previous pro-life protest on March 25 that called on Speaker Boehner to schedule an immediate vote, eight leaders were arrested, including Newman, pro-life blogger Jill Stanek, and Rev. Patrick Mahoney of the Christian Defense Coalition.
“We understand that our protest did prompt some progress, but still, there is no vote on this late-term abortion ban on the horizon,” said Newman. “We simply can’t stop until we have the vote we were promised.”
This time, instead of arrests, the groups involved plan to display photos of late-term abortion victims and present Boehner’s office with models of babies at 20 weeks.
“Abortion is such a sterile term in our society,” Tara Shaver noted in a recent interview. “We see that it’s effective to use the images of abortion victims to bring meaning back to the words. Rather than something political or abstract, we want people to think of that dead baby, that dead child, instead. We are against abortion. We are against pre-born child killing. We are against what the picture depicts.”
Newman agrees.
“We want the politicians in Washington to understand exactly what we are talking about when we discuss abortion on babies after 20 weeks. The photos tell the story in a glance of an inhumane, barbarous procedure that should not be tolerated in a civilized society,” he said. “This isn’t just a political issue. It’s a human rights issue that requires immediate action to save lives.”
The protest will begin with a press conference at noon on May 7 outside the Longworth office building located at the Longworth House Office building 1011 Longworth. The group will then move inside to make the presentation of the fetal models to Boehner’s staff. No arrests are being planned.
For more information, please follow this event on Facebook.
Sign the Petition, Stand With New Mexicans: Free The Late-Term Abortion Ban