Home > Debates > Defend the Defenseless

Defend the Defenseless

September 11, 2001 is considered to be one of the most tragic days in the history of the United States. Almost 3,000 people lost their lives in the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington. Everybody remembers exactly where they were when they first heard the news, and there will always be memorials to those who lost their lives that tragic day.

Yet the number of innocent people who died that day falls short of the 3,700 lives that were quietly cut short by abortion today. Not to mention the 3,700 that died yesterday, and the day before and the day before.

Few topics will get more people immediately riled up than abortion. Pro-life or pro-abortion rallies occur almost every day of the week around the country.

The issue of abortion has been clouded by politics and spin. Yet, when the facts of abortion are presented it seems easier to see an abortion for what it is. A cruel and barbaric murder.

According to the Mayo Clinic, an unborn baby’s heart begins pumping blood through his young body 22 days after conception. At seven weeks he can kick with his newly formed limbs, and has all of his fingers and toes, complete with nails.

By eight weeks old she can hear the outside world and at 20 weeks will be able to recognize her mother’s voice.

According to the Guttmacher Institute, the majority of reported abortions occur in the first 12 weeks of pregnancy. An abortion performed at this stage is most commonly done through the suction-aspiration method, in which a sharply edged tube is inserted into the uterus to suck the baby into a jar.

After 12 weeks, the most common method is a D and E, which stands for dilation and evacuation. At this point the baby is too big to suction out, so the doctor is forced to take the child out in pieces.

After the cervix is dilated, a plier-like instrument is inserted into the uterus and body parts are removed until only the head remains. The head is then crushed and removed.

Until 2003, partial-birth abortion was allowed in cases when the pregnancy had surpassed 21 weeks. The baby was delivered feet first except for the head. The doctor would then use scissors to put a hole in the back of the head, where a suction catheter sucked out the child’s brain, causing it’s scull to collapse.

Since this procedure was banned, doctors now opt to give a lethal injection before removing the lifeless body from the mother’s womb.

These descriptions are not scare tactics or unnecessary gruesome details. They are the reality of abortion, and that reality paints a bleak picture of a culture that has legalized the killing of children.

The Supreme Court’s Roe versus Wade ruling legalized abortion in 1973 and has since been repeatedly upheld by the Court. But should abortion be an inherent constitutional right?

The Alan Guttmacher Institute reports that since 1973 there have been more than 40,000,000 legal, documented abortions. These lives have been cut short at the end of a tube or a knife to be discarded like trash, and political and media “progressives” have carefully tutored the American public to accept this taking of life as a right to be defended.

Yet, wasn’t it the “right to life,” rather than the removal of it, that our forefathers listed as an “unalienable right?”

Socially we have been groomed to talk about abortion as an issue of a woman’s privacy or right to “choose,” rather than an issue of a young child’s personhood.

Dr. Michael Bauman, professor of Theology and Culture at Hillsdale College, has written about the verbal gymnastics that often swirl around this issue.

“By aborting fetuses rather than murdering babies our linguistic slight of hand has hidden the real nature (murder) of our action and the real identity (baby) of our victim,” Bauman said. “We must tell [mothers] they are merely ‘terminating a pregnancy,’ …unlike abortion and murder, which seem to imply nasty things like blood and death, simply to terminate a pregnancy sounds as innocuous as ending a radio transmission…”

Many pro-abortion activists defend their position by referencing a few, relatively rare exceptions. “What about a woman who was raped,” has become the standard “gotcha” question.

However, the Alan Guttmacher Institute, which is associated with Planned Parenthood, did a broad study in 2004 on the question of why women get abortions. The study indicated that only 0.5 percent of the women surveyed indicated that they had been raped.

The most popular reason for having an abortion was that the timing was wrong for a baby, which was the answer of 25 percent of the women in the study. The next most common responses were “can’t afford a baby” with 23 percent, and “have completed my child bearing” with 19 percent.

As tragic as that may sound, it seems that the main cause of abortion is personal convenience.

When we get distracted by a small minority of situations we fail to see the tragedy that young lives are being slaughtered by the millions, and most of the time its essentially because the parents don’t feel like having a baby.

It’s true that many of the women who have abortions are in incredibly difficult or tragic situations. But this does not make the killing of a child any less appalling. Murder does not fix tragedy.

Abortion is not an issue of women’s rights, but rather a question about whether we value human life in the way we should. Do we view it as something valuable that should be defended and preserved, or do we view it as something to be discarded.

We live in a time where we could face jail time and six-figure fines for harming the egg of an eagle, yet we have clinics where any woman can legally kill her baby.

I suppose in one sense we are all “pro-choice.” When it comes to the issue of abortion we are all faced with the question of choosing life or death.

I choose life.

Contact Adam Shorey at communitarian@mail.dccc.edu

The Communitarian Opinion Policy: The opinions expressed on the editorial and the op-ed pages do not necessarily reflect those of The Communitarian staff or college. We welcome your comments on any matter relating to Delaware County Community College, and responsible rebuttal is encouraged. Write to communitarian@mail.dccc.edu. Please write “letter to editor” in the subject box.