I live in California. This month a majority of voters enshrined the right to unlimited abortion into our constitution. Including late term abortion. Abortions can take place even when the baby is old enough to live outside the womb. I was so thankful for the rightful overturning of Roe v Wade but was awaken to the fact that the largest state in the land, and other states as well, are still dismembering babies in their mothers’ wombs mostly using what could be called a vacuum cleaner.[1]
In 1972 I was 12 years old when Roe v Wade became the law of the land. Here were some things that occurred to me as a 12-year-old child.
- What about the right to life? Doesn’t the baby have the right to life?
- Will it hurt the baby when it’s aborted?
- If we “don’t know” when life starts shouldn’t we be extra cautious and not risk killing someone?
- I thought there weren’t enough babies for families who want to adopt.
- Why would the argument surround a “woman’s right to choose.” No one has the right to choose to do whatever they want to do with their own body. Murderers don’t have the right to “use their own bodies” anyway they want. Rapists don’t. Even I don’t. Not unless mom or dad say it’s okay. Couldn’t any argument be framed this way? What about pedophiles? Isn’t this just wordplay or doublespeak going on?
- And besides there is another body involved in abortion. The baby’s body. Doesn’t he/she have the right to at least keep their own body and live?
- How is protecting children who just haven’t been delivered stifling a woman’s “reproductive rights?” Heck, she’s already reproduced. That’s the issue. Now there is a second life, the baby’s life. Now she and the dad are responsible for that life.
Yeah, I guess I was a bit different as a pre-teen. Anyway, as time has passed, these questions still wrack my brain, and I haven’t found satisfying answers to most. (Although we do know the current evidence shows fetuses start feeling pain at 12 weeks and maybe as early as 8 weeks. The heart begins to beat at 18 or 19 days.[2])
No, nothing has changed my opinion about abortion. And while I hold those old views, I also have new concerns regarding abortion:
- We learned right away that fetuses were not just globs of cells, a kind of magic jelly. No, they were tiny little beings. The word fetus is derived from Latin. Its meaning: fetus (n.)”the young while in the womb.” It also bore the connotation of the bearing of young, a bringing forth, pregnancy, childbearing, offspring. The literal meaning is “little one like us.” The word fetus was also transferred to the newborn baby itself. In the Latin world a fetus was a baby both before and after delivery.
- One of the main arguments for abortion was to keep young women out of poverty. The poverty rate in 1972 was 11.9%. It reached record lows in the Trump administration, but under the Biden administration it’s increased to 11.4% [3] There are many factors connected with the poverty rate but even if the 0.5% decrease could all be attributed to abortion, I very much doubt most Americans would be willing to have 60 million babies aborted for a half a percentage point of decreasing poverty.
- Women are also victims of abortion. Studies show up to 44% of women view their abortion experience as a traumatic event. When stressors leading to PTSD is abortion, some clinicians refer to this as Post-Abortion Syndrome (PAS).[4]
- Roe v Wade said abortion was only legal to “protect the life and health” of the mother. Any natural reading would assume that the phrase was covering the physical health of the pregnant woman. When the courts finally confessed it included the “mental health” of the woman everyone thought that would involve a psychologist or psychiatrist. We were wrong. All that was necessary was that a woman needed to be anxious about her pregnancy.
- With the ubiquitous availability of free contraceptives why are there any unwanted pregnancies in the first place? Can’t people old enough to have sex be responsible enough to use contraceptives? Why does the baby have to sacrifice its life because people were thoughtless and negligent?
- In 1972 the vast majority of Americans felt abortion was unthinkable. When the august Supreme Court of the United States of America said our sacred Constitution gave women the right to an abortion, we believed them. It was only later that we discovered we were duped. Most of us learned much later that the ruling acknowledged that abortion was not mentioned anywhere in the Constitution. What had happened was the court ruled that within the Constitution there were so-called “penumbras[5] and emanations[6]” which led to a right to privacy. And that right to privacy allowed a woman to decide to abort her baby. However, there are competing rights here. Like the right to life of the baby. And the right to life in nearly all circumstances trumps a person’s privacy rights.
- Is Planned Parenthood really driven to improve the lives of young, mostly minority, women? Really!?! Or is it mostly concerned about making money? Its not a non-profit, it has a corporate culture – a profit making culture. They have turned the body parts of dismembered aborted babies into a commodity and sell them for a profit! (The University of Pittsburgh harvests limbs, organs, and other body parts from live fetuses who are not anesthetized.) Ex-employees say they had quotas for each abortion clinic. They say their job was to “close the deal” and convince inquirers and reticent women to have abortions.
- Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, was a white supremacist and a proponent of eugenics. She admired Hitler and Nazi Germany and their use of eugenics in the Holocaust.
- Was it abortion that introduced a culture of death to America? The graphic and bloody nature of what is considered entertainment today would have been inconceivable in 1972. Has abortion desensitized a whole generation of young urban men who have determined that life is cheap. Gang warfare and mass shootings used to be rare occurrences and are now commonplace. Was it the butchering of 60 million of our most precious and defenseless children that was the catalyst for all this?
In conclusion, how did we as a culture come to the place where mothers are pitted against their babies in a life and death struggle? How is it that we’ve sanitized an unthinkable and barbaric act. So much so, that if described in plain English people are sickened and revolted? 60 million lives – 60 million! I am convinced that future generations will judge us more severally than we judged Nazi Germany. They will shake their heads and wonder how a whole generation of Americans rationalized such an unmistakably barbarous act.
Finally, I also think this helps us understand the left better. If a person or a movement can rationalize abortion, they can rationalize anything. Pedophiles can be “minor attracted persons.” Balenciaga can photograph kiddie porn and the leftist media and celebrities can ignore it. Genders can be fluid. Teenage boys/men can shower in a girls’ locker room. Maiming and poisoning children to alter their appearance is a service to the youth community.
There used to be a hyperbolic phrase back in the day. It was mostly used for murderers and rapist. You would say, “That guy has sold his soul to the devil.” We didn’t really believe it but we said it to make an impact. After slaughtering 60 million defenseless “little ones like us,” it’s incontrovertible that the left really has bargained away their souls.
[1] Sorry, I know this is graphic and even distasteful. But I have learned that using code words like in utero dilation and extraction can make abortion sound so sanitized. But the hard truth is abortion is the barbaric tearing apart of a tiny human being limb from limb.
[2] https://www.hli.org/resources/when-does-a-fetus-develop-a-heartbeat/
[3] https://www.self.inc/info/poverty-rates-in-each-state/#poverty-rate-over-time
[4] For a more thorough examination please reference Appendix A
[5] The Cambridge dictionary defines penumbra: the part of a shadow, especially one made by something blocking the sun, in which only part of the light is blocked.
[6] The Cambridge dictionary defines emanation: the act of producing something or of expressing a quality or feeling.
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