Against Abortion

Final Since the Darwinian Revolution of the 19th century everything under the sun had become questionable, the origin of life, how we came to be, who we are, why are we here, and where are we going, all became questions in life. Societies values, morals and ethics became debatable, with some people striving for change and others fighting for stability. Battle lines had been drawn and the Liberals and Conservatives are fighting over a number of issues. One of these debates centers on a woman's right to have an abortion. A woman’s right to abort an unwanted pregnancy.  Unwanted pregnancy. What an emotional hot-button those two words are. What connotations they carry. They conjure up fear in the heart of any woman who hears them. They’re so… absolute! But wait! Do you mean that I can have a choice?! Phew! Choice. How liberating.  - Who will decide this most personal decision of a woman’s life? Will women decide, or will the politicians and bureaucrats in Washington? - They want to take away your right to choose and give it to politicians. - Who decides? You decide! - Freedom of Choice - Women must have control over their own bodies. “I remember laughing when we made those slogans up,” recalls Bernard Nathanson, M.D., co-founder of the National Abortion Rights Action League, reminiscing about the early days of the abortion rights movement in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. “We were looking for some sexy, catchy slogans to capture public opinion. They were very cynical slogans then, just as all of these slogans today are very, very cynical.” Besides having served as Chairman of NARAL’s Executive Committee, as well as its Medical  Committee, Nathanson was one of the key architects and strategists of the abortion movement in the United States. 1  In the fiscal year 2006-2007 the annual report from Planned Parenthood shows the nation's largest abortion business made over $1 billion in income.2  What this means to the abortion debate is that the people and organizations who defend the morality of abortion the most vehemently are generally the very same ones who rake in huge profits from its continued availability. This sets up a significant conflict of interest. When Planned Parenthood argues that they're working hard to reduce the frequency of abortion, the fact remains that their financial livelihood is built on abortion. Planned Parenthood, then, is just like the big tobacco companies. Does anyone really believe that tobacco companies want people to stop smoking? Does anyone really believe that Planned Parenthood wants people to stop having abortions? Follow the money. On the flip side, those who argue that abortion is an act of violence against an innocent human being, do so at great financial cost. There is no pay-off on the “pro-life” side. All the efforts to educate people about the reality of abortion consume large amounts of money, and there is no billion dollar product to refill the coffer. Think about it. Those who support abortion the most are growing rich off its continued availability while those who oppose abortion the most are losing money for their efforts. Who, then, is more likely to be honest and forthright about the issue at hand? Who is more likely to be motivated by principle and who is more likely to be motivated by profit? 3 Freedom of Choice. Like thalidomide, which women chose to help them relax, until the epidemic of deformed children surfaced; like the Dalkon Shield, which women chose to protect them from pregnancy, until the body count grew too great to ignore. If we are to have real freedom of choice, we cannot be blinded by semantics and cynical slogans. If we are to have real freedom of choice we must not allow our perceptions to be distorted by those who rake in obscene profits. If we are to have real freedom of choice we must open our eyes to reality. 4 A woman’s right to abort. According to the Webster's dictionary abort is defined as: to terminate a procedure prematurely.”  To abort a pregnancy, simply means to end the pregnancy pre-term, rather than full-term. The word abort is used in a number of different situations, such as, “The flight was aborted during take-off.” Or, “I suggest that you abort the project.” I am always stunned at the casual use of the word ‘abort’ whenever it is applied to pregnancy. Wouldn’t you be stunned if an airline flight was aborted by killing the passengers? Or, a project manager aborted the project by killing the employees? What is a woman pregnant with? She is pregnant with a baby. All pregnancies end with a baby. They end either full-term, or pre-term, they end with a live baby, or a dead baby. But they all end with a baby. That’s reality. Webster's dictionary defines abortion as: the termination of a pregnancy after, accompanied by, resulting in, or closely followed by the death of the embryo or fetus.  The death of the embryo or fetus.  Like toddler and adolescent, the terms embryo and fetus do not refer to non-humans, but to humans at particular stages of development. Semantics affect perceptions, but do not change reality. Calling the unborn a “product of conception” or “blob of tissue” is a way of depersonalizing the unborn child. In reality, the infant, the teenager, and the adult are all “products of conception,” no more or no less than the fetus. Everything that determines the individuality and originality of a person is established at conception. The first single cell contains the entire genetic blueprint in allits complexity. The heart starts beating between 18 and 25 days. Electrical brainwaves have been recorded at 43 days on an EEG. If the absence of a brainwave indicates death, why will pro-abortionists not accept that the presence of a brainwave is a confirmation of life? Reality check! The brain and all body systems are present by 8 weeks and functioning a month later. At 8 weeks, the baby will wake and sleep, make a fist, suck his thumb, and get hiccups. At the end of 9 weeks, the baby has his own unique finger prints. The baby is sensitive to heat, touch, light and noise. All body systems are working. At 11-12 weeks he weighs about 28g and is 6-7.5 cm long. He is fully developed before his mother's pregnancy is even noticeable. 5 That’s reality.   The Official Senate report on Senate Bill 158, the "Human Life Bill", summarized the issue this way: "Physicians, biologists, and other scientists agree that conception marks the beginning of the life of a human being - a being that is alive and a member of the human species. There is overwhelming agreement on this point in countless medical, biological, and scientific writings." 6 With the sonogram, we can see that a person is growing and developing in the mother's womb. We can discern eyes, ears, fingers, a nose, and a mouth. Our own eyes tell us this is a baby growing and maturing. This is not a piece of protoplasm; this is a baby inside the womb.  From conception, the new person conceived is as deserving of the full protection of the law as any other person.  That’s reality. There is nothing about birth that makes a baby different than he was before birth. A baby may be legally disfigured, poisoned, and burned with salt while inside the mother’s womb, but if the child is born and moved a few feet away from the womb he is now considered a person and all the preceding actions would be murder. The nature and value of a child do not magically change just because he has moved from inside his mother to outside.  The equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment of the United States Constitution grants all people “equal protection of the laws,” which means that the laws must be applied equally and cannot give preference to one person or class of persons over another. The law should not apply one way for whites, and another way for blacks, or one way for men, and another way for women. As U.S. Supreme Court Justice Lewis F. Powell stated in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, 1978, “The guarantee of equal protection cannot mean one thing when applied to one individual and something else when applied to a person of a different color. If both are not accorded the same protection, then it is not equal.”  A young college student discovers that she is pregnant. The young woman is terrified. What will her church and family think? She is not emotionally ready for motherhood. She will have to drop out of college and lose her scholarship to care for the baby. All of her hopes and dreams are shattered. Her whole life is ruined! She decides that she is going to kill the baby by abortion. But the young father protests, “No, it’s my baby too, I want to keep the baby.” But her mind is made up, and she kills the baby anyway. The law says this is legal. Now let’s reverse the roles. The young man is terrified. What will his church and family think? He is not emotionally ready for fatherhood. The law will force him to financially support the child. He will have to drop out of college and lose his scholarship. All of his hopes and dreams are shattered. His whole life is ruined! He decides the baby must be killed by abortion. But the young mother protests, “No, I want to keep the baby.” But his mind is made up. He strikes the woman and the baby dies. For the same reasons the woman kills the baby in the first scenario, he kills the baby. Now the law says this is murder and he is arrested. The same law applies one way to one person, but another way to the other person. The legality of the issue is determined by who does the murdering. Is the law being applied equally? Perhaps the best legal argument against abortion is seen in the case of Roe v. Wade. Most of the Supreme Court’s verdict rested upon the sentence. “We need not resolve the difficult question of when life begins.” It violated standard legal reasoning. The burden of proof in law is on the prosecution. The benefit of doubt is with the defense. This is also known as a presumption of innocence. The defendant is assumed to be innocent unless proven guilty. Again the burden of proof is on the one who would take away life or liberty. Put another way: "when in doubt, don't." A hunter who hears rustling in the bushes shouldn't fire until he knows what is in the bushes. Likewise, a Court that doesn't know when life begins, should not declare open season on the unborn. The Supreme Court decided not to decide when life begins and then acted as if it just proved that no life existed in the womb, and overturned the laws of 50 different states that protected the unborn and has resulted in over 45 million abortions in the United States. Think of it. 45 million people dead. That is more than all soldiers who ever died, in all the wars America has ever fought, combined!  A crucial role of government is to protect life. The Supreme Court's decision of Roe v. Wade was a horrible decision that must be overturned, it separated personhood from humanity. In other words, the judges argued that a developing fetus was a human but not a person. Since only persons are given 14th Amendment protection under the Constitution, the Court argued that abortion could be legal at certain times. This left to doctors, parents, or even other judges the responsibility of arbitrarily deciding when personhood should be awarded to human beings.  But where do you draw the line? When does a human being become a person? The Court opted for biological criteria in their definition of a "person" in Roe v. Wade. The Court chose the idea of viability and allowed for the possibility that states could outlaw abortions performed after a child was viable. But viability was an arbitrary criterion, and there was no biological reason why the line had to be drawn near the early stages of development. The line, for example, could be drawn much later. Ethicist Paul Ramsey frequently warned that any argument for abortion could logically be also used as an argument for infanticide. As if to illustrate this, Dr. Francis Crick, of DNA fame, proposed a more radical definition of personhood. He suggested in the British journal Nature that if "a child were considered to be legally born when two days old, it could be examined to see whether it was an 'acceptable member of human society.'" Obviously this is not only an argument for abortion; it's an argument for infanticide. Other line-drawers have suggested a cultural criterion for personhood. Ashley Montagu, for example, stated, "A newborn baby is not truly human until he or she is molded by cultural influences later." Again, this is more than just an argument for abortion. It is also an argument for infanticide. More recently some line-drawers have focused on a mental criterion for personhood. Dr. Joseph Fletcher argues in his book Humanhood that "Humans without some minimum of intelligence or mental capacity are not persons, no matter how many of these organs are active, no matter how spontaneous their living processes are." This is not only an argument for abortion and infanticide; it's also justification for euthanasia and the potential elimination of those who do not possess a certain IQ. 7 Is this what we have come to? Some human beings are not persons? Some human beings do not have the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness? Who decides which humans are persons and which humans are not?  These are some of the same arguments that were used by liberals to support slavery. Consider the Dred Scott case in 1857: The Supreme Court decided by a 7 to 2 majority, that according to the US Constitution, black people were not legal persons. They were the property of the owner. He could buy, or sell, or even kill them. Abolitionists had objected. The ruling was outrageous, they said. It was immoral and discriminated against an entire class of living persons solely on the basis of skin color. But those who supported slavery argued that those who had a moral objection to slavery didn’t have to own slaves. No one was forcing them to own slaves. But they also said: “Don’t force your morality on the slave owner. He has the right to choose to own slaves if he wishes.” In a very similar decision just over one hundred years later, in 1973, in the Roe v. Wade Decision, the US Supreme Court decided that according to the US Constitution, by the same 7 to 2 majority, that unborn people were not legal persons. They had no civil rights, no human rights and were therefore, legally the property of the owner (the mother). She had the absolute legal right to keep or kill her unborn baby. Pro-life people objected. The ruling was outrageous, they said. It was immoral and discriminated against an entire class of living people solely on the basis of age (too young) and place of residence (the womb). But those who support abortion argue that those who have a moral objection to abortion don't have to have abortions. The pro-abortionists say: "No one is forcing you to have an abortion. But don't force your morality on the mother. She has a right to choose to kill her developing baby if she wishes." Abraham Lincoln in the 19th century said: "No one has the right to do what is wrong." 8 This country ended discrimination based on race. Are we now going to start discrimination on the basis of age? Saying:” I’m older than you, I'm bigger than you, I have a voice - therefore I can kill you."  As Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said, “ Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” If we allow one class of human beings to be declared non-persons, who’s next?  The elderly, and the handicapped? The poor and anyone else those in power deem to be un-wanted? It is unfortunate that life isn’t valued like it once was and that independence and financial gain have become the new objectives in life. What does this say about us as a society when we begin to murder our own and then claim that we are modern and civilized? 1. Aborted Women: Silent No More, by David C Reardon, 1987, Crossway, Westchester, IL  2. Planned Parenthood Abortion Business Makes $1 Billion Income for First Time, by Steven Ertelt, LifeNews.com Editor, March 28, 2008 3. Abort73.com / The Case Against Abortion / Abortion for Profit 4. Aborted Women: Silent No More, by David C Reardon, 1987, Crossway, Westchester, IL  5. Time Magazine and Rand McNally's Atlas of the Body (Rand McNally, New York, 1980) p139,144 6. Report, Subcommittee on Separation of Powers to Senate Judiciary Committee S-158, 97th Congress, 1st Session, 1981, p7. Cited in Pro-life Answers for Pro-Choice Arguments, By Randy Alcorn, (Multnomah Press, OR, USA, 1992), p43 7. Arguments Against Abortion, Kerby Anderson http://www.leaderu.com/orgs/probe/docs/arg-abor.html 8. Abortion and Slavery - History Repeats, by JC Wilke, MD. 1984, Hayes Publishing Company Inc. Cincinatti, OH USA p12,14,74