The Democrat candidates’ playbook for the midterm elections has but one page, with one directive: Protect abortion at all costs. They are calling for “Roevember.”

Roe as a ruling may have fallen, but now we will see just how devoted the servants of abortion are, as they shout from the rooftops how they will stop at nothing to “protect women’s rights” and “safeguard reproductive health care” and “ensure access to abortion for all women.”

Gavin Newsom is taking out billboard ads in other states, telling women they can come get their abortion in California. Most despicably, he’s (mis)using the words of Christ to support his peddling of infanticide. If you still doubt the demonic nature of abortion, let these ads finally convince you. Only the devil himself could try to twist the command of Jesus to “love your neighbor as yourself” to mean “come here and we’ll help you kill your baby.”

Gretchen Whitmer in Michigan and Val Demmings in Florida are also pounding the message that women cannot be free and in control of their own lives unless they can kill their babies. “Men just want to control women’s bodies!” they shout. “We won’t go back!” they bark. Regrettably, many women will swallow that message whole.

Stacey Abrams’ ludicrous pronouncement about fetal heartbeats would be great parody in any other time, but incredibly, she seems to have been serious. It had to be said, you see. The abortion industry can’t defeat the heartbeat, so the heartbeat must become a fantasy, an illusion, a tool of misogyny. Then they are once again justified in stopping that heartbeat because it never really was.

Never mind all the doctors and scientists who have crushed Abrams’ idiotic statement with scientific, biological facts. The voters who love to invoke science will, in this case, deny science. The fetus has no heartbeat because Democrats said so.

Time for a Different Response

The decision facing each state in our union, and thus our nation, exposes exactly what sort of people we really are. If this opportunity to correct so grave an injustice is thrown away and instead, we double-down on the injustice, then we are a hopelessly depraved society. We will have taken into our marrow the most cruel and perverse violence humankind could know.

It is simple: Decent people do not demand the power to kill their own children. Kind, compassionate people do not demand the “right” to kill their own children. Parents do not fight for the legal “right” to kill their own children.

If that is what the people of the United States demand by their votes, then our society has fallen to animalistic, barbaric lows not seen for ages, if ever. At least the pagans of old did their killing out in the open, with no pretense about their sadistic sacrifice.

We commit our violence under cover of euphemisms, lab coats, medical clinics, and profit. We sell our killing as “freedom” and “equality.” We create industries solely to carry out the killing, then more industries to take and sell the tiny victims’ lucrative organs and further satiate our greed.

None of this is civilized or progressive. This is what predators do. This must never, ever be what parents do. This must never, ever be what any just society does.

The choice before us isn’t whether men and women are equal, or whether women can control their bodies, and it isn’t about reproductive health care. It is whether men and women, fathers and mothers, openly demand the legal power to have their own children killed at will.

The soothing euphemisms do not change the brutal reality. Our deceptive slogans may dull our consciences; our emotional appeals to self-interest may stir up our defenses, but nothing will ever alter the fact that our demands are satisfied by tearing a baby into pieces.

Yes, the undoing of Roe is bringing our nation to a moral precipice. Right now, it is difficult to be hopeful that this once blessed nation will continue to be so blessed. People whose thinking has so deteriorated as to revere abortion as a sacred “right” cannot expect to enjoy peace or prosperity or happiness. When deadly violence against the defenseless is the default; when parents demand their child’s life for their own, blessing will not come.

The moment is here, and we can either abolish this heinous human rights violation or we can declare openly that we are barbarians. Let our children’s blood be upon us!

That’s what it comes down to. Let there be no pretense about being a society interested in justice or compassion. Let us not even pretend that a good society can sanction abortion and all its tentacle revenue rackets. No, if it’s us or them, and we want to kill them, then America is a mafia.

Let the leaders and politicians with courage say it plainly: A just and compassionate society does not demand the power to kill its own children. Decent people do not demand such power. Good parents do not demand the “right” to kill their own children.

Jennifer Hartline is a senior contributor to The Stream. You can follow her at @jenniehartline.