As a gardener, when the seeds I plant all come up, I ordinarily discard the excess sprouts in favor of the number I plan to care for. Some people carry such weeding out into the domain of human affairs, as with the practice of abortion.
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Among the participants of human “thinning” are those who hold that a woman has an option to select or discard those of her “seeds” that she doesn’t want. Advocates for aborting unwanted offspring have pushed and managed to get the law to do their bidding on this heartless practice. But I feel that while abortion promoters have succeeded in pulling the rug out from under the public, the majority of Americans have gotten up on their feet, wondering how on earth killing babies ever became legitimate.
Sorry, I meant to say fetuses. But where does a fetus end and a baby begin? This is a question with no legitimate answer, for the process of conception-to-birth is a continuum with no organic borders. A human life begins and the process from start to completion is continuous. Drawing a line anywhere in the process is as arbitrary as picking which tomato plant to set where in a row and as successful as keeping water from leaking out of a pipe with band-aids. Any such line is purely subjective, indeterminate, and indefensible in any context consistent with reality. The deceptive jargon used to dignify this de facto act of killing innocent human life needs to be seen for what it is. And terminated. We are not dealing with tomato plants but human beings!
No special clarity of vision is required to see through the arguments on abortion, starting with the one that a woman has the right over her own body. People are sent to hospitals and other institutions, often against their will. People convicted of crime are put in prisons. These are just two cases of suspended autonomy over the body. One must wonder what right any of us actually possess over our own body. Even if such self-rule over one’s body were possible, is it true that a human embryo is part of a woman’s body or is it rather a body in its own right, inside the mother for protection and nourishment, on its way to becoming a new human being?
When we hear that the human embryo or fetus is insensate, devoid of feeling or ability to think, or that it is nonhuman, we must wonder whether these descriptions more aptly apply to an individual that decides in cold blood that an emerging new human is to die. Where does such a person get the right to condemn anyone to death? Not from nine Supreme Court justices whose mistaken ruling in the case of abortion has had to be overturned.
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The salient issue in abortion is whether a woman shall have a method of doing away with her unwanted child, free of social stigma or disapproval. With the law to lean on, the woman whose mind proves to be stronger than the body may go ahead and disregard the urgent, natural human call to give birth and stop a baby from entering the world, without having to wrestle with her conscience.
Such uninhibited callousness loosens the fabric of our society and degrades its moral stamina and cultural integrity, allowing it to drift to barbarism. When the foundations shake over a “cause” that issues death sentences to “unwanted babies,” you know that a big lie has been swallowed by many who disregard the desires and needs of the many who long for babies but are unable to have them biologically.
Why should we add to the insufferable difficulties the world is known to deliver with regulations that make it possible to kill babies while they are on the “wrong side” of a mother’s body?
Whether deliberately or out of ignorance, abortion has taken on a life-and-death issue, which involves the role of the law. Something must be said in this connection that isn’t getting heard. In every case of a viable conception (the coming child) there is a “third party” that has as much a right to live as the other two parties responsible for the event. It happens to be the same right that you and I had at our conception, a right granted us by God.
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Anthony J. DeBlasi is a veteran and life-long defender of Western culture.
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