Infanticide is perhaps the most disgraceful of murders, since the victim is truly innocent, entirely helpless, and has the most to lose in terms of forgone life. Yet shaving a few months, days, or even minutes or seconds from an infant’s age changes this horrible crime into something ordinary and righteous in many people’s minds.
I assert that “abortion” is in fact “infanticide”, because it is killing a person. While many people support abortion outright, many others passively accept it because they refuse to oppose a mother’s right to choose (even if they wouldn’t choose it for themselves). One reason they hesitate to oppose abortion is they want it to be available to mothers whose health is at risk because of pregnancy. Let’s say we agree that in such a case where a mother would die unless the pregnancy is “terminated”, killing a person is justified. (We may not agree, but for the sake of argument let’s say we do.) Abortion is not generally justified because there are extraordinary circumstances where killing a person is justified, rather it is only justified under the strictest of circumstances.
In the United States, you do not have the right to choose murder. We are endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights, including life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness (Declaration of Independence). We are not afforded the right to murder, to take life. Therefore, to support abortion, whether actively or passively, it is necessary for you to believe one of two things. You must either believe that abortion is not the killing of a person, or you do believe that it is killing a person but that extreme circumstances in rare cases justify the act.
The Alan Guttmacher Institute conducted a study on International Family Planning Perspectives where they determined mothers’ underlying reasons for abortion. The results showed that in the U.S. only 2.8% cited risk to maternal health, 3.3% cited risk to fetal health, and the remaining 94% cited various socioeconomic reasons, most commonly “wants to postpone childbearing” at 25%.
http://www.guttmacher.org/pubs/journals/2411798.html
Fewer than 3% of aborting mothers even claim to face health risks. If you passively support abortion simply for the sake of maternal health (in spite of killing a person), then you must oppose the remaining 97% of abortions as you would any other murder. If abortion is indeed murder, then a mother has no “right to choose” it any more than a mother has the right to choose infanticide for socioeconomic reasons. (I will leave open the possibility for exceptions, as with killing of any sort.)
Many people support women’s rights to choose abortion because they think the government ought not legislate morality. It will not take much work to convince me that a dramatic reduction in the size and scope of government would be a wonderful improvement, as it would increase the liberty of the people they mean to serve. However, I do believe that protecting life is a fundamental function of the government. Murder is a punishable crime, even if it is otherwise economically optimal given my costs and benefits. Likewise, if abortion is indeed killing a person, then the government has a responsibility to protect the lives of victims from the people who determine that terminating those is personally optimal.
The key point of contention I will now turn to is whether or not abortion is indeed the killing of a person. As God is the authority from whom we derive our human rights (as opposed to an endowment of rights from a human institution, which is effectively meaningless), I will appeal first to the Bible. In Psalm 139, David praises his maker:
13 For you created my inmost being;
you knit me together in my mother's womb.
14 I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made;
your works are wonderful,
I know that full well.
15 My frame was not hidden from you
when I was made in the secret place.
When I was woven together in the depths of the earth,
16 your eyes saw my unformed body.
All the days ordained for me
were written in your book
before one of them came to be.
God personally and intentionally creates each person with a purpose devised before the beginning of time. He knew us intimately before we were even conceived. Clearly God wants His creation to be born, or He wouldn’t have created it. For all intents and purposes, there is no period of time where a person created by God is not a person.
Now I will appeal to biological evidence to show that abortion is the killing of a person. As every human life is endowed with unalienable rights according to the Declaration of Independence, the relevant question now is when does human life begin? At a United States Senate Judiciary Subcommittee, leading scientists in their fields were called to testify as to when life begins. The testimonies were unanimous: not one would say life begins at any time but the moment of conception. The following quotations, documented in Congressional records, can be found at: http://www.humanlife.org/abortion_scientists_attest.php [Report, Subcommittee on Separation of Powers to Senate Judiciary Committee S-158, 97th Congress, 1st Session 1981]
Dr. Alfred Bongioanni, University of Pennsylvania
“I have learned from my earliest medical education that human life begins at the time of conception.
…I submit that human life is present throughout this entire sequence from conception to adulthood and that any interruption at any point throughout this time constitutes a termination of life.
…I am no more prepared to say that these early stages [of development in the womb] represent an incomplete human being than I would be to say that the child prior to the dramatic effects of puberty...is not a human being. This is human life at every stage.”
Dr. Hymie Gordon, Mayo Clinic
“By all criteria of modern molecular biology, life is present from the moment of conception.”
Dr. Micheline Matthews-Roth, Harvard Medical School
“It is scientifically correct to say that an individual human life begins at conception.”
Dr. Jerome LeJeune, University of Descartes
“after fertilization has taken place a new human being has come into being.”
Dr. Watson A. Bowes, University of Colorado Medical School
"The beginning of a single human life is from a biological point of view a simple and straightforward matter-the beginning is conception. This straightforward biological fact should not be distorted to serve sociological, political, or economic goals."
Despite the fact that biological life begins at conception, some people excuse abortions in certain stages of pregnancy based on arbitrary stages in the fetus’s (infant’s) development. Perhaps it is okay to kill a baby before it forms a recognizably human mass, or before its heart starts to beat on its own. Yet we acknowledge that "life" exists in much simpler nonhuman organisms, even as small as a single cell (and without functioning organs like a heart). For the purposes of defining “life,” even at the earliest stages (conception) the life cycle is in motion (and the life of a person has rights that need protection). Thus, we must admit to the reality that abortion kills people, and deal with it as such.
Earlier today a friend objected to my very right to peacefully and passively protest abortion publicly, while it was intensely insensitive for me to oppose a woman’s right to kill her baby. Is there any logical method to arrive at this perverse concept of “rights”? Am I compelled to “tolerate” a murderer’s intolerance? We must not let our emotions and sympathies for pregnant women cloud the reality of this supremely despicable crime.
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