Digging this topic back up from a couple of posts ago, because it seems to be coming up all over the place lately. As a result, it’s been on my mind, and now is getting its own blog post.
Abortion, to my eyes, is one of the most incredible problems we face as a nation, from a moral standpoint. It’s extremely divisive, morally ambiguous, and has great social power weighing in on both sides of the argument. More importantly: it involves the mass murder of over a million Americans every year.
Did that get your attention at all? Let me say it again: this is the mass murder of over a million Americans every year. Condoned, and sometimes paid for, by your government. If you’re not pissed off about this yet, then you probably won’t like the rest of my blog.
The debate surrounding the topic of abortion is a fascinating one to me: the undisputed facts are that currently about 1.2 million abortions are performed in America every year, and that each of those abortions ended the life of a human baby in utero. No one argues that. The argument is over whether or not that’s an acceptable occurance. If you think about that for a while, that the argument has nothing to do with medical procedure, but whether or not those babies are in fact people with natural human rights – well, its enough to drive a person mad. And people can argue back and forth about that all day, and it certainly will not be solved on the pages of this blog, but in my mind I’ve never understood how someone can so easily rationalize away a human life – be it an unborn child or an eldery grandfather or a woman in a coma.
But even bringing up the topic of abortion will quickly expose the presuppositions of those involved in the discussion – those who feel it’s simply a social/religious policy issue versus those who feel it is a moral life and death issue. And while I suppose you may find many of the “social policy” crowd in the pro-life camp, I doubt you’ll find many who think that abortion is muder participating at pro-abortion rallies. What I am saying is that those who suggest abortion is only a social issue are dismissing abortion as being the ending of human life, because if it was truly about human life then we’d be talking about whether it should have the full weight of first-degree murder behind it, or if it should just constitute something like negligent homicide.
Instead, these people have for the most part either try to remain ignorant of the facts, or else grasp at straws to suggest that somehow the baby has not yet been given its right to live because it lacks specific body parts, or is too dependent on its mother, or has not yet fully developed conciousness… But these are trifles, and cannot form a solid platform to stand on. So instead you hear, far more often than any other argument, that abortion is necessary in cases of rape, incest, or instances in which the life of the mother is risked.
A couple of years ago, while arguing the so-called merits of abortion in an online community, I dug up an interesting fact: less than 1% of abortions are because of rape or incest, and somewhere between 75% and 85% of rape victims opt against abortion. Even fewer are listed as due to the mother having life-endangering health problems. We’re talking roughly 0.7% of all abortions being done for these reasons. Even if we add in other health reasons, the total rises to only roughly 2%. The vast majority of abortions are done out of mere convenience, not because of this percieved “necessity.”
Now, with President-elect Obama promising to pass FOCA if it gets to his desk, and the Catholic church facing widespread withdrawl from the healthcare field as a result, we face the possibility of government-assisted abortion making massive leaps forward on a national scale and overriding every countermeasure placed in the last 35 years. It’s a scary thought and proves that the pro-abortion movement is not interested in merely making abortions available where it could be considered “necessity,” but instead making it available upon request to every girl and woman in America, without such restrictions as waiting periods, parental consent or even notification, and funding it with your tax dollars. This wants you to pay for the systematic genocide of an entire generation of as yet unborn children, and that’s simply the fact of the matter.
This is not a country that should embrace genocide as a national heritage.