Earlier this month, shortly before Rep. Steve King introduced a federal version of her “heartbeat bill,” Religious Right activist Janet Porter appeared on a West Virginia Christian radio program to promote her legislation, saying that it represents the anti-choice movement’s best chance to totally outlaw abortion once and for all.
Porter’s “heartbeat bill” would ban abortion from the moment a fetal heartbeat can be detected, which can happen as early as six weeks into pregnancy and often before many women even know that they are pregnant. Porter explained on the “Mountain Heartbeat” program that she is no fan of incremental efforts to ban abortion by gradually chipping away at access and legal protections because such efforts still allow too many abortions to occur. Instead, she said, the movement needs to “quit regulating around the edges of abortion” and finally “bring the killing to an end” by supporting her “heartbeat bill.”
While her bill does not outlaw abortion from the moment of conception, she said that it will be “the foot in the door to take us all the way.”
“In fact, the pro-abortion folks came into the committee hearings and what they said is that this will outlaw all abortions,” Porter bragged, “and I’m sitting there silently saying, ‘Yes, that is the goal.'”
Porter noted that she has struggled for years to get lawmakers in her home state of Ohio to enact her legislation and has realized that “influencing the elected has not worked; we must become the elected.” Religious Right activists must run for office, she said, and copy the success of the left, which she said has managed to transform America from a nation in which “sodomy was illegal in every state” into a place where Christians are now facing persecution for opposing marriage equality or transgender rights.
“It’s appalling what’s happening,” she said, “but it’s encouraging to see when people rise up, what happens.”
