You knew, of course, that Sen. Jason Rapert would be unashamed of pushing a blatantly unconstitutional anti-abortion bill through the legislature and spending state money to defend a 12-week abortion ban that even anti-abortion judges like the 8th Circuit’s Lavenski Smith couldn’t find a way to uphold.
He took to Facebook with his response to the ruling permanently enjoining his 2013 legislation. It quotes Mother Teresa, Ronald Reagan and a famous Arkansas senator named Jason Rapert.
It also comments:
… I am disappointed that the 8th Circuit did not see fit to take a stand for life in this decision by upholding the 12-week ban, but I am very encouraged that they acknowledged that viability is now earlier than once argued and that science is now proving that life is sustainable as early as 21 weeks. This is very important to the ongoing debate.
I submit to everyone that every single baby is viable if left in their natural environment which is the mother’s womb. It is only when a baby is ripped or torn from their mother’s womb that they are not “viable”. ….
Rapert also — getting ready for a bad outcome on his desire to oppress gay people by denying them equal rights — inveighs against “one single federal judge” who substituted her opinion for the wishes of a majority of the legislature and, according to polling, Arkansas people. That would be Republican Judge Susan Webber Wright who could do no other than bow to well-established U.S. Supreme Court precedent that says abortion may not be prohibited before viability and the state presented no evidence that a 12-week-old fetus could survive outside the womb. Gov. Beebe said this would happen in vetoing Rapert’s bill. The legislature passed it over his veto anyway.
Rapert will fight on. “Some people may be able to rationalize the killing of little babies, but I cannot and will not.”
He and Lavenski Smith, one of Arkansas’s contributions to the 8th Circuit, should get together to talk things over. Smith made the strange remark that viability was moving ever closer to conception. He apparently envisions a day when the microscopic zygotes in rape victims — otherwise known as babies in Rapert’s formulation — may be protected from morning after pills.