“I think we have deluded ourselves into believing that people don’t know that abortion is killing. So any pretense that abortion is not killing is a signal of our ambivalence, a signal that we cannot say yes, it kills a fetus.” – Faye Wattleton, former president of U.S. Planned Parenthood
Abortion is one of those topics that is often swept under the rug because it’s unpleasant and hard to talk about. We indulge ourselves in whatever we feel to be pleasant. We need to teach our children the reality of everyday life or they may find themselves unable to tackle that which is hard or inconvenient. While people don’t want to face the facts of abortion and say in effect “let others deal with it,” real human lives are being lost.
Those that advocate for “choice” regarding abortion agree that it is killing a fetus or as Ann Furedi states, a “human life.” Furedi said, “We can accept that the embryo is a living thing in the fact that it has a beating heart, that it has its own genetic system within it. It’s clearly human in the sense that it’s not a gerbil, and we can recognize that it is human life… the point is not when does human life begin, but when does it really begin to matter?”
This begs the real questions regarding abortion: Does a beating heart matter? What defines the importance of human life? Does one human life matter more than another human life? If the debate is the dependency of the child on the mother or that the unborn baby would die without constant care then why is it acceptable to end the life of an unborn child, but not the life of an infant, or someone on welfare or on life support? One cannot ethically distinguish the importance of a human life without generalizing that importance to all human life regardless of that human’s stage of development.
Naomi Wolf, a feminist author and pro-choice supporter, states:
“Clinging to a rhetoric about abortion in which there is no life and no death, we entangle our beliefs in a series of self-delusions, fibs and evasions. And we risk becoming precisely what our critics charge us with being: callous, selfish and casually destructive men and women who share a cheapened view of human life…we need to contextualize the fight to defend abortion rights within a moral framework that admits that the death of a fetus is a real death.”
These advocates for choice realize that not only is abortion killing a human life, but they want to try to remain free of delusions and evasions to stop appearing callous and destructive. They want to ultimately remain a civilized society that legalizes the extinction of an innocent human life by trying to argue, like Furedi, that yes it is a human life, but evidently some lives matter more. The contradiction is evident in their own argument. Either the entity growing inside a pregnant woman is alive and considered a human or it is not. If the fetus is alive and growing then it does matter. To say it doesn’t is a perfect example of being “callous” and “destructive” against human life. Women should not abort to rescue themselves from the negative social implications or the inconvenience of having a baby. Nor should abortion be used as a form of contraception.
Pro-life advocates seek for society, government and all people to respect the gift of life and to respect one another. The Declaration of Independence gave us our liberty from tyrants thousands of miles away and gave birth to our nation we know today. As United States citizens we are given the right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” under this declaration. We also read from our founding fathers that “all men are created equal” and that we are given agency to do with our lives the way we each see fit. There are some who would say the “pursuit of happiness” gives them the right to do as they please –including aborting a child. However, if we are all truly equal and we all have these same rights and freedoms as human beings, and if leaders of Planned Parenthood can attest to an aborted baby being a human person and not a gerbil, then under the same Declaration of Independence babies are entitled to “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness” just as you, me, and everyone else. To deny that child the right to live is thus unconstitutional. Your freedoms and rights do give you power, but not the kind of power that governs over another human being’s life.
The time for abortion to end is now.
We live by the mentality that what we can’t see doesn’t exist. Just because a growing baby does not begin to show on a recently pregnant woman, does not justify ending that baby’s life. If individuals feel that they’re mature enough to have sex and feel they have the right to have sex then they must also accept the responsibilities associated with having sex. The child’s right to life supersedes the inconvenience of becoming pregnant. As adults we celebrate and enjoy our lives, however, we need to remember to celebrate and respect the lives of the unborn.
As already stated, abortion is a tough subject to bring up and to calmly and rationally discuss, but it is a subject that cannot be brushed aside with the difficult questions left unanswered. Are we going to brush the topic of abortion to the side and ignore this issue while so many innocent unborn children are losing their right to even live? The call has gone forth for people, governments, and nations to address the difficult questions. The call is here. Help end abortion now. Who is going to answer?
Andrew Mossman is a recent graduate of Brigham Young University Idaho with a Bachelor’s degree in Science in Psychology and a minor in Marriage and Family Studies. Andrew’s goals include helping citizens to understand and perceive abortion in a new light in hopes to help those who don’t/ won’t care really come to know what abortion is and the real implications it has on the mother, child, and society.
Jennifer Wilson is a recent graduate of Brigham Young University with a Bachelor’s in Marriage and Family Studies. She has been married for two years and she and her husband recently had their first child.