THE POLITICS OF ABORTION

Let’s face it. There has been a lot of ink spilled over the abortion issue these past few weeks. But let’s be honest. Who is abortion aiding? Women’s right-to-know bills display all the facts of what abortion is, show the ultrasound image of the fetus, and expose the dangers and side effects of post-abortion trauma. Such laws are truly open and informing which clearly illuminate the truth. Such informed consent laws enable women to make fully informed conscientious choices.

When measure are passed to ensure that an abortion procedure must follow certain protocols, many people cry foul and say that a group of anti-woman, anti-choice men are foisting their moral judgments on others. This is nonsense. We have all kinds of laws that prevent certain choices. A teenage girl cannot get her ears pierced or be emblazoned with a tattoo without parental permission. So why the outcry when certain people want to ensure that an abortion procedure meets the same standards as that of a hospital?

If the pro-choice, pro-abortion advocates were really for women’s health, then they would be working hard to ensure that girls knew how to resist sexual pressures. We all know that the gift of human sexuality is a powerful force in our lives, yet if we can teach children and students that they can say no to cigarettes, drugs, and alcohol, then why can’t we apply the same techniques to the sexual drive? Our culture has allowed the children to believe that pregnancy prevention relies upon contraception rather than chastity or abstinence. Yet who is teaching the young boys to respect the rights and emotions of the young women they plan on having sex with?

Although abortion is packaged and sold as a healthy choice of a woman coming of age, all too often it is nothing more than a fast and convenient way for the male and female to deny the reality and the result of their relationship. Many men who support abortion do so for personal and social expediency. Other men won’t readily admit it, but many who favor abortion rights do so for their own promiscuous convenience. They are the types who want the availability of non-consequential sex and any slip up or careless act that yields a pregnancy can easily be eliminated.

Unfortunately, with so much codependency and denial in our country, has abortion become a discreet way for women to get rid of the evidence that they have allowed themselves to be sexually exploited by men?

Slavery

Recall the Englishman William Wilberforce. He was opposed for his stance on slavery, yet time has proven he was a political prophet. Today, no one in their right - or left - mind would attempt to justify slavery. In the days of American slavery, there were many Democrats who were pro-slavery. The prominent Illinois Senator, Stephen Douglas, who was the Democratic Party nominee for President in 1860, held that he was pro-choice, not pro-slavery. Just as some politicians contend today that they are personally opposed to abortion, then there were those that were personally opposed to slavery, but refused to legislate morality. In effect, there are those today who treat the unborn as less than slaves. At least the Dred Scott Decision held that African Americans were 2/5 human, but Roe v. Wade doesn’t afford the unborn any human rights. As we know, Douglas lost to the Republican Party's candidate, Abraham Lincoln, in the presidential election.

No one in their left or right mind would attempt to justify slaveholding today using the pro-choice argument. Perhaps there will be a day in the future when history will judge our own generation as harshly for its pro-abortion stance as it has judged the pro-choice slavery stance of our forebears.

Anytime any group of people in power wanted to extinguish the humanity of a particular group of human beings, the members of this inferior group were deemed as human debris, or less than human. Thus begins a genocidal mentality with the powerful first describing their intended victims as less than human, and finally erasing any visage of their human nature from their beings. All that, and more, with a simple shift in the language.

The Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, went on Meet the Press last week and feigned ignorance in regards to the scientific evidence that life begins at conception. But even PBS and NOVA and National Geographic show clearly that there IS a moment of conception. Regardless whether one argues for the beginning of life from conception or implantation, the heart is beating by the 18th to 21st day of pregnancy.

As the U.S. Bishops point out in their recent statement: “Scientists discovered that a new human individual comes into being from the union of sperm and egg at fertilization. In keeping with this modern understanding, the Church teaches that from the time of conception (fertilization), each member of the human species must be given the full respect due to a human person, beginning with respect for the fundamental right to life.”