Abortion-Seekers Fleeing Texas Are Getting A Taste Of What Anti-Lockdowners Have Felt For A Year And A Half

Less than two days have passed since the U.S. Supreme Court declined a request to block the implementation of a law in Texas that protects unborn babies whose heartbeats can be detected. And already, the left has compared Texas to the Taliban, begun setting up funds for Texans seeking out-of-state abortions, and called for private businesses to move their operations out of state.

No doubt there are women in Texas who are pregnant but don’t want the child, or who are worried about a future pregnancy they’re not planning for. But the heartbeat abortion ban is the law now, meaning women whose pregnancies are past six weeks of gestation have a choice to make: Stay in Texas and let their children live, stay in Texas and try to find someone who will kill their babies against the law, or leave.

For many on the left, the first option is no option at all. And as was evidenced by abortion facilities declining to schedule September appointments for women more than six weeks pregnant, the second option will be largely off the table as well. That leaves only the option to flee Texas, and for pro-abortion pregnant women (or those who might get pregnant) who are rooted in the Lone Star State, this is perplexing.

Leaving Texas doesn’t just mean packing up a car. It means leaving what’s familiar, finding new friends, maybe quitting a job and needing a new one, possibly selling a house, and paying for a new place to live plus all the associated costs, just to name a few. Getting yourself out from under government rule you don’t like is no easy task.

If you want to know how difficult it is, just ask one of the many Americans who felt compelled to leave blue cities and states throughout COVID-19 crackdowns.

Trying to Escape COVID Tyranny

For a year and a half, Americans have suffered from oppressive diktats under the guise of a pandemic emergency. At the beginning, heightened caution and emergency declarations were understandable while we all tried to figure out this novel virus and how to live with it prudently, protecting the vulnerable and others we love. But then things changed.

We flattened the curve. We overcame our shortages of personal protective equipment. Many of us got the virus and recovered, supplying us with antibodies, at least for a while. Thanks to Operation Warp Speed, we got three vaccines that have been shown to be effective at preventing death and serious illness. We learned who was most at-risk, such as elderly folks, and leaders such as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis ordered their vaccine rollouts accordingly. Deaths dropped off dramatically.

But the emergency orders and onerous restrictions did not. In many places, they stayed in full force or were slapped back on the minute somebody had a breakthrough case. In Dane County, Wisconsin, for example, unelected health department bureaucrats imposed a mask mandate just last month for everyone, including the vaccinated and toddlers as young as 2 years old, even though the data showed that the average seven-day death toll had been steady at zero since the middle of May. You might call it an “undue burden” on healthy citizens.

Nevertheless, many Americans got tired of harsh lockdowns, hypocritical elites’ flaunting the hierarchy, and logic-denying mandates, so they packed their bags and left places like New York, D.C., and California for places like the Midwest and Texas. It’s why trying to rent a moving truck out of an urban hub was exorbitantly expensive — believe me, I tried. I fled the tyranny of the D.C. metro area the same way many women and virtue-signaling businesses are now threatening to leave Texas.

Some Key Differences

There are two fundamental differences, however, between pregnant women learning to live under the new Texas law (or trying to escape it) and Americans living under the COVID regime.

First, the heartbeat law came about as part of a constitutional process while many COVID mandates did not. The Texas legislature crafted the bill, passed it, and sent it to the governor’s desk where it was signed into law. Wuhan virus restrictions didn’t always work that way. When governors exhausted their emergency powers, unelected state and local bureaucrats often stepped in to issue sweeping unconstitutional mandates.

At the federal level, the Biden administration colluded with Big Tech to squash information that didn’t bolster their preferred policy prescriptions, while bureaucrats like Anthony Fauci pushed for vaccine mandates. Where government actors lacked authority to enforce mask rules and social distancing, they outsourced their tyranny to private businesses, ordering them to post mask requirements on their doors and to deny service to those who didn’t adhere to the puzzling conventional wisdom.

Second, abortion is inherently murderous while coronavirus freedom is mutual risk assessment. Now, the left’s immediate retort to this distinction is that coronavirus rules really are a matter of life and death and that pro-lifers are lying when they say they care about protecting human life because they killed masses of people during COVID. Of course, one look at the lethal nursing home policies of leaders like former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo reveals who the real culprits are, not to mention the delusion that outdoor church services were somehow more deadly than a summer of crowded protests.

But even aside from these examples, the truth is that while it’s easy to determine whether a baby’s heart is beating in utero, it was much harder to navigate the ever-changing coronavirus guidelines (such as the flip-flopping on masks and the politicized vaccine stances) and to trust the untrustworthy “experts” who lied about masks to ration them and squashed the very plausible lab-leak theory, for instance. Complying with social distancing for “14 days to flatten the curve” made sense for a brief time, but the emergency has since subsided.

Despite the media hyperventilating, the pro-life movement is predicated on the fact that every abortion kills a living human being. Every time a woman chooses to “terminate her pregnancy,” to use the left’s whitewashed euphemism, two beating hearts and two distinct sets of DNA enter an abortion facility and only one leaves.

That black-and-white certainty, both empirically and logically, simply doesn’t exist for COVID, about which the consensus and conventional wisdom have changed like the wind at politically convenient intervals. At this point in the pandemic, thanks to vaccines and the knowledge that children are at a nearly nonexistent risk of dying from the coronavirus, unmasked personal interactions are far from deadly, and each interaction with a potentially vulnerable person is at least in part their own choosing. The same can never be said for an unborn child.

That’s why “my body, my choice” actually does apply to COVID, but not to the two separate heartbeats involved in an abortion.

What Kind of Freedom Do You Want?

Despite these significant differences, at the heart of the matter, both Texans opposing the heartbeat law and Americans opposing lockdowns and mandates all want freedom. Some just want the freedom to exercise their natural and G0d-given rights, such as breathing uninhibited, gathering with family and friends regardless of vaccination status, worshipping with full voice, and protecting the lives of unborn children. Others want freedom from their natural responsibilities, to instead destroy what doesn’t suit their lifestyles or threatens their financial security. Their twisted version of freedom that pits mothers against innocent children is no freedom at all.

It’s a shame that women would claw to get out from under an abortion ban rather than embrace their incredible God-given ability to create the next generation. But if they’re looking for people who understand coping with rules they don’t like, there are tens of millions of Americans who have spent the last year and a half becoming the authority on that.

The Federalist