The Cross of Freedom

About the word ‘choice’...

Why is it that people who believe abortion is OK are afraid to use the word ‘abortion’?  They call themselves ‘pro-choice’ and people who argue against them ‘anti-choice’.   If they really believed what they were saying, they wouldn’t find it necessary to hide behind a comfy-cozy word like ‘choice’.

A person who is against abortion is not anti-choice, any more than a person who is against rape, armed robbery or embezzlement anti-choice.  Many pro-abortion folks are against adoption.  Doesn’t that make them ‘anti-choice’ as well? (After all, adoption is a choice).  Choice goes way beyond the abortion issue.   If I took seven pieces of paper and wrote three illegal activities (let’s say rape, armed robbery and embezzlement), three legal activities (let’s say adoption, donating to charity and going on a skiing trip), and add abortion (since that's the current topic of discussion), and drew one of them from a hat, would I have the right to carry out whichever one I picked simply because that was my choice?  I hope not, or we’re all in trouble.

We all make thousands of choices every day.  No anti-abortion person is arguing against choice.  Each choice that can be made must be evaluated on its own merit.  Something is not right simply because someone can choose to do it.

About the ‘until it’s born, it’s not a baby’ argument...

There is often an argument concerning whether a fetus is a living human or not. It's obviously ‘living’, otherwise why the need to ‘kill’ it through abortion?  As far as whether it is human, DNA testing has put that to rest.  When DNA testing became reliable, tests were done to determine if a baby inside the mother had human DNA and whether it was unique.  These tests proved not only that the unborn child had a complete set of human DNA, but that it did not match the mother's DNA.  In other words, these unborn children are separate human beings.  The testing of the unborn child's DNA showed the same results as testing of any human DNA - It contains a combination of the DNA profile of both the child's mother and father.

Even before DNA testing, there was a logical argument for the unborn child being a separate human being.  If your mother had had an abortion while she was carrying you, would you be here? No.  Are you a human being? I’d like to think so.  So, since your mother didn’t have an abortion, you’re alive - if your mother had had an abortion, you’d be dead - you are a human being.  The difference between having an abortion and not having an abortion is a human being - you.

If you could travel back in time to when you were in your mother’s womb, and she was considering having an abortion, I'll bet you’d be anti-abortion then.

About the ‘until it can survive on its own, it’s part of my body’ argument...

By that logic, you’d be entitled to kill your child until about the time he/she reaches high school.  The time of birth really has no bearing on survivability.  A child can survive outside the mother as early as at 5 months gestation.   He/She is not able to survive on their own until years later.  Between these two points in time, he/she is dependent on an adult - not necessarily the mother or the father, but any responsible adult.  Since this period crosses over the traditional point of birth, and includes both the time before and after this point, the child’s dependency on the mother has no relation to when he/she is in the mother’s womb.  The only thing that changes at birth is where the baby lives, not a dependency on his/her mother, and not their status as a human being.

Also, the baby is not part of the mother just because it is attached by an umbilical cord.   If I plug my neighbor’s boom box into a cigarette lighter adapter in my car and drive down the road with it, do I then own the stereo?   Why not?  I’m supplying the energy to keep it alive.  If I don’t want it anymore, don’t I then have the right to pull the plug and toss it out the window of my car and into the street?  Why not?  Don’t I have the right to do what I want with my own car?  What do you mean, the stereo wasn’t part of my car?  It was attached by a cord, wasn’t it?   I was keeping it alive, wasn’t I?   It’s not a stereo until I unplug it from my car.  Until then, it’s part of my car. Right?

How about siamese twins that share one heart, and the heart is located completely in one of the twins?  In this case, the one twin is supplying life to the other.  Is the second twin part of the first twin, or are they each their own person?  If the first twin kills the second twin, is he/she guilty of murder?

If the child is not a separate entity, why is a person who kills a pregnant woman charged with two murders?  The child either IS or IS NOT a separate human being.  There are no other options.   If the child IS NOT a separate entity, then there was only one murder in this example.   If the child IS a separate entity, then the mother has no more right to take its life than anybody else does.

About the ‘I should be able to have control over my own body’ argument...

Yes you should.  How about before you get pregnant?  This reminds me of a cartoon I once saw where a girl has just been asked by her boyfriend to spend the night with him.  She says to herself... “I don’t know if I can resist.  He gets me so excited.   I just can’t help it.   I tingle all over and have such an urge to make love to him.   I probably shouldn’t, but I just can’t help myself.  If I get pregnant, I can always have an abortion.  After all, I should have control over my own body.”

Contrary to pro-abortion belief, pregnancy is not an accident.  It requires two people in (except for rape) a combined effort.  What is killed in an abortion is not ‘your own body’ but someone else’s body.

About the ‘You can’t stop people from having sex’ argument...

The justification given to ‘sex anytime I feel like it’ is similar to that given to many other actions these days.  An action is not valid just because it can be done and someone wants to do it right now.

The natural intention of intercourse is to make babies.  This seems obvious considering the number of centuries mankind has been attempting to change this.  Even so, pregnancy can only happen during a portion of every month.  The rest of the time, pregnancy cannot occur.  And even during the time of the month it CAN occur, there are many ways to prevent it from occurring.

Saying ‘I can have sex anytime I feel like it’ is like saying ‘I can drive through a highway intersection any time I feel like it’.   In both cases, the answer is 'only when the consequences of doing so do not have a potentially negative impact on another individual’.   In the case of the highway intersection, you have the right to drive through only when you have the right-of-way (for instance, when the light is green).  You are also protected by the car itself (and your seatbelt) or, in the case of a motorcycle, a leather jacket and helmet.  In the case of sex, you have this right only when you either want the natural consequence of this act (a baby), or you believe the chances of pregnancy are minimal and you are willing to accept the consequences if you are wrong, or if you are using some kind of protection and are willing to accept the consequences if the protection fails.

About the ‘Without abortion, a lot of unwanted babies would come into the world’ argument...

First of all, the parents of a newly-conceived baby are pretty arrogant to assume that their baby is unwanted just because THEY don’t want it.  There are many people out there unable to have their own who would be thrilled to adopt that baby.

Secondly, it seems strange that adoption has tough rules, long waiting lines and high costs, and abortion has no rules, no waiting and low costs.  Society has made it extremely difficult to nurture a child and extremely easy to get rid of one.  Sounds weird, doesn’t it.

Thirdly, there are a lot of unwanted people in the world, people of all ages.  Should we kill them too?  How about people in nursing homes?  Many of them are unwanted.  If someone should decide they don’t want you, do they have the right to kill you?

Unwanted babies don’t come into the world because of a lack of abortion.  Unwanted babies come into the world because people want to speed through the sexual intersection against the red light with no seatbelt (or helmet, as the case may be) - any time they get the urge.

In closing...

I haven’t mentioned religion at all yet, because the issue of abortion being wrong is so clear that it wasn’t necessary for me to do so to make my point.   However, I believe that there is a life beyond this one and that everyone who is conceived in this world has a chance to live in that glorious paradise - unless, of course, they turn it down (suprisingly, many do).  How this relates to abortion occurred to me while I was listening to a radio call-in program one night.

The subject was near-death experiences.   People were calling in and talking about their own near-death experience.  They all talked about similar things – floating toward a bright white light, a feeling of complete peace and happiness, and seeing people that had gone before them.  A young woman called in and related her experience, which was like the others.  Then she said that, while she was seeing people who had gone before, a young man came up to her and said ‘Hi, mom!’.  She was confused by this.  She had never had any children.  Then she remembered – she had had a miscarriage two years earlier…and it had been a little boy.  She knew that this must be that little boy…her little boy.

After she finished, I began thinking about her story.  If miscarried children move on to the next life, then aborted children do as well.  And if parents of miscarried children meet up with them in the next life, then parents of aborted children must do the same.  Think about what this means.  Every doctor who performs an abortion, every nurse who assists in an abortion, every mother who has an abortion, every father who allows or encourages an abortion, every politician who passes laws for abortion or fails to pass laws against abortion, every member of the legal profession who defends abortion, every judge who rules in favor of abortion, all of these people will some day have to face all of the children who were killed because of them and answer the question: Why?…what did I do to deserve the death penalty?

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