Abortion — A Rational Debate is Due
Human life starts at conception. This is not a moral question, nor a legal question, nor a philosophical question, nor a religious question. It is simply a scientific fact: human life starts at conception. It is amazing how many people, who otherwise feign allegiance to “science,” and who fancy themselves rational, enlightened persons, deny this plain fact and substitute irrational emotion and fallacies for scientific fact and reasoned discussion.
The tag line, “Trust Women,” used by many abortion protagonists, is an example of the kind of fallacious messaging employed regarding the emotionally charged topic of abortion. Think of what that message implies. “Trust women,” it says. And given the clear biological facts, apparently some people want us to trust women instead of scientific fact. And they want us to trust women instead of our own minds. And they want us to trust women, instead of the author of the Ten Commandments, who has instructed us, “Do not murder.” An interesting twist to the message of “Trust Women” is that many women are against abortion and understand it to be the unjust killing of helpless, vulnerable human life. So, if we are to ignore clear biological facts, and deny the thoughts of our own minds, and ignore the Ten Commandments, in order to “trust women,” which women exactly are we to put our trust in?
Let’s Debate Rationally — Drop the Ad Hominem
At this point, many will undoubtedly dismiss everything I have to say on the subject, simply because I’m a man. Many will even resent me for saying anything at all about it, simply because I’m a man. Do I actually need to point out the fallacy of such a position? Yes, I’m a man. I’m a man with a mind. I’m a man who can read. I’m a man who can think for myself and come to rational, reasoned conclusions about many different topics. I’m also the husband of my wife, who is a woman. And I’m the father of three daughters and a son. And I’m the son of a woman, my mother, who did not abort me. And I am friends with many women who are persuaded that abortion is wrong. So, I ask the reader to indulge me and read my reasons for asserting that the practice of abortion in the United States and throughout the developed world is a horribly wrongheaded practice and miscarriage of justice. Focus, if you will, on the content of my arguments, instead of dismissing my arguments, because I’m a man. Such a dismissal, if I must point it out, is a fallacy known as ad hominem, which is Latin for “to the man.” Such a fallacy attempts to dismiss an argument based on the identify of the person making the argument, rather than focusing on the merits of the actual argument.
60 Million Abortions in the U.S. Since Roe v Wade — An Important Topic
On January 22, 1973, in the Roe v. Wade decision, the United States Supreme Court struck down previous laws in most states that had protected the right to life of babies still in their mothers’ wombs. The highest court in our nation legalized the termination of the life of babies in utero, at any time during pregnancy, if continuation of pregnancy, or childbirth, was felt to be hazardous to the mothers’ “health.” The “mother’s health” was broadly defined to include the “distress… associated with an unwanted child.” Thus, the killing of an unborn baby, for no more reason than mere birth control, was legalized in the United States. Since the Roe v. Wade decision, as of February 2019, about 60 million babies in utero have been killed in the United States alone, in the name of women’s “right” to abortion.
Pause and think of that number for a few moments. Let it sink in. 60 million babies in utero in the United States have been killed by medical professionals, at the behest of the babies’ mothers, since 1973. The magnitude of this number is so staggering that it is difficult to comprehend. A comparative analysis is helpful.
In all of the United States’ wars and military conflicts, throughout the nations’s history, about 1 million United States citizens have been killed. (That number does not include the citizens of other nations killed.) The list is below.
Revolutionary War: 4,435
War of 1812: 2,260
Mexican War: 13,283
War Between the States: 364,511
Spanish-American War: 2,446
World War I: 116,516
World War II: 405,399
Korean War: 36,574
Vietnam Conflict: 58,220
Persian Gulf War: 383
Operation Enduring Freedom: 2,347
Operation Iraqi Freedom: 4,410
Operation New Dawn: 73
Operation Inherent Resolve: 67
Operation Freedom’s Sentinel: 52
Total of all U.S. wars & military activity: 1,010,976
These numbers are from the Congressional Research Service, in a report prepared for Congress in September 2018. I realize these numbers are not necessarily absolutely accurate, nor all inclusive, and so are disputable. But even if other conflicts, such as those with the Seminoles and Sioux, are included, the maximum total number approaches 1.4 million — not a huge numerical difference. Thus, the number of abortions in the United States, since 1973, is approximately 60 times greater than the number of all the Americans killed in all of the wars and military conflicts of the United States since it’s inception. With a number of that magnitude, doesn’t the topic of abortion deserve intelligent, knowledgeable, well-reasoned debate and discussion, rather than fallacious messaging and irrational emotionalism?
Human Life Starts at Conception — And That’s a Fact
Note that I’m not invoking religion or philosophy in this section of my article (that will come later) — just biology.
At the very moment of conception, a new human life begins. If left to itself, in the normal course, the new life will grow and develop, and about nine months later, the mother will experience her baby being born. At conception, all of the genetic information is in place, all of the inherited features are set: the gender, the eye color, the facial features — everything.
The first cell soon divides into two, and the cells divide again and again as the cell formation travels toward the uterus. Around day 6, the new body of cells attaches loosely the wall of the uterus, or womb, and over the next week burrows deeply and attaches securely to it. The womb is designed to be a safe and comfortable home for the new baby over the next 9 months. Pregnancy tests can now show positive, and by the end of the second week, the mother’s menstrual cycle is suppressed by a hormone produced by the presence of the new life.
On day 17, blood vessels begin to form, and amazingly, the future sex cells that will generate either sperm or eggs (depending on the gender of this new child) begin to group together, preparing for the procreation of the next generation. During days 18 through 20, the foundations of the brain, spinal cord and nervous system are formed. On day 22, the heart begins to beat, and the eyes begin to develop. From day 26 to 27, the lungs begin to form. From day 28 to 32 the arms and legs start to show; and the mouth, nose and tongue start to form. By day 32, the new baby has a recognizable face. On day 36, color develops in the retina of the eye. By day 44, we are able to detect electrical activity in the brain. By day 52, the baby is making movements such as frowning, squinting, furrowing the brow, pursing the lips; moving arms and legs; turning the head; touching the face; stretching; opening the mouth; yawning and sucking.
By 8 weeks, the baby is well-proportioned, even though he or she is only the size of an adult thumb. At 12 weeks, fine hair begins to grow. At 13 weeks, the baby is actively moving around, but the mother cannot yet feel the baby’s movements. The mother starts to feel the baby’s movements sometime between 17 and 20 weeks. By 5 months, the baby’s brain contains about 2 billion cells.
Don’t Get all Philosophical on Me Now
At this point, some abortion protagonists, the more thoughtful ones, will try to make the argument that even though a human body is forming, there is not yet any human life present. I think what they’re trying to assert is that there is not yet any human soul present. Well, how do you know? Who told you? That’s pure philosophical speculation, without any rational basis.
What we do know is that babies in utero can feel pain, respond to external stimuli, and express emotion. That certainly seems like evidence of a living human soul to me.
Surgeons who have performed corrective surgeries on tiny unborn babies in utero have witnessed those babies flinch, jerk and recoil from sharp objects.
A peer-reviewed scientific study in 2013 demonstrated that babies in utero can not only hear music, but they can also learn to recognize and remember melodies, and this activity aids in their brain development. The online PLOS One article is open access and free to read. You can check it out here:
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0078946
With my own children, I often sang to them when they were still inside my wife’s body. My wife would lay in bed, and I would kneel on the floor and put my face near my wife’s abdomen and sing. If my baby, still in my wife’s womb, was moving around, he or she would immediately become still at the sound of my voice.
What Abortion Looks Like
Note that this section is not for the faint of heart nor queasy of stomach.
There are two general types of abortion: chemical and surgical. Chemical abortion methods are used during early pregnancy, including immediately after conception (e.g., the “morning after pill”), to disrupt the natural course of development of the baby in the mother’s uterus, cutting off the new life from essential needs, such as oxygen and nutrients, and thereby causing the new life to die. Surgical abortion methods are used during later pregnancy to physically kill, dismember and remove the baby’s body.
Some of the most commonly used abortion methods are described below. This list is not meant to be comprehensive, but rather just briefly describe some of the more common abortion procedures.
RU-486, or the “abortion pill,” is a chemical abortion procedure used up to the ninth week of pregnancy. Two drugs, Mifepristone and Misoprostol, are used. Mifepristone blocks progesterone from the uterine lining, causing the baby to die. Misoprostol causes the uterus to expel the dead baby. It can be thought as a forced or planned “miscarriage.”
Manual vacuum, or suction, aspiration (“MVA”) is a surgical procedure used up to the twelfth week of pregnancy. The mother lies on her back with her feet raised and legs spread apart. A vaginal speculum is inserted to force open the vagina. A local anesthetic is administered to the cervix. Then a tenaculum, or surgical clamp, is used to hold the cervix in place, and the cervix is dilated by cone shaped rods. When the cervix is open wide enough, the abortionist inserts a long plastic tube, which is connected to a suction device, into the uterus. Think of a very powerful vacuum cleaner. Within 10 to 15 minutes, the contents of the uterus are completely sucked out.
Dilation and Curettage (“D & C”) is a surgical procedure used up until the fifteenth week of pregnancy. This procedure is similar to the suction aspiration procedure described just above, with the addition of a long, hooked knife to cut and scrape away the contents of the uterus.
Dilation and Evacuation (“D & E”) is a surgical procedure used up until the twenty-first week of pregnancy. This procedure incorporates everything in the two previous surgical procedures, plus forceps are used to remove larger body parts. After this procedure, all the body parts of the baby are examined and placed together by an attending nurse to make sure all the parts of the baby’s body have been removed from the mother’s body.
Dilation and Extraction, also known as “Partial Birth Abortion,” is a surgical procedure used after twenty-one weeks of pregnancy right up to time of normal birth. Two days before the procedure, laminaria is inserted vaginally to dilate the cervix. During the procedure, the abortionist uses forceps to rotate the baby into the needed position and then pull the baby out of the mother’s body, feet first. First the feet and legs are pulled out, then the main part of the body, and then the shoulders and arms. The head is left just inside the mother’s body, so that the baby is not yet considered legally born. With the baby face down, the abortionist cuts an opening in the base of the back of the skull. The abortionist then inserts a catheter into the baby’s skull and sucks the baby’s brains out, so that the baby’s scull collapses. Then the abortionist pulls the baby’s crushed head out of the mother’s body.
Surely partial birth abortion is the most gruesome, barbaric indecency perpetrated by anyone in our world today. And to think that this is being done under the guise of “medicine” and “health” is mind boggling and extremely disturbing.
How Do You Feel About Infanticide?
If you are a person who is aghast at the suggestion of infanticide, but you support women’s “right” to abortion, you really owe it to yourself to rethink your position and examine your logic. There really is no logical difference between abortion and infanticide. Both are the killing of a completely vulnerable human life. The fact that one is defined as being done before birth, and the other after birth is a mere technicality. They are the same.
Whose Body?
In her recent indecent harassing of Supreme Court nominee, now Justice, Brett Kavanaugh, California Senator Kamala Harris asked Mr. Kavanaugh if knew of “any laws that give the government power to make decisions about the male body.” Mr. Kavanaugh was not prepared for the question, and he didn’t handle it well. But I can answer Ms. Harris’s question. All laws regarding abortion are laws that give the government power over the male body. Presumably, approximately half of the babies aborted in the United States are male (though in China, many more female babies are aborted than male). Thus, abortion is an area of law in which our government has mandated that women have the “right” to kill their babies — both male and female. But the issue is deeper than that and goes to the very essence of the purpose of law.
All laws give the government power over all of its citizens’ bodies, in the sense that laws restrict us from doing certain things. For example, for the sake of argument, if Ms. Harris desires to kill Mr. Kavanaugh, she is prohibited by law from doing so. (I’m not accusing Ms. Harris of desiring to kill Mr. Kavanaugh. I’m just using this hypothetical example to make an argument.) Thus, the government, through force of law, restrains and prohibits all of us from certain illegal actions.
The same principle applies (or should apply) to abortion. Women should not be allowed to kill their babies in utero. Why? Because it’s wrong.
This is All About Morality
A couple of generations ago, in the United States, abortion was relatively unheard of. I realize it happened. But it wasn’t prevalent. And it certainly wasn’t the norm.
The sexual revolution of the 1960s in the United States has led to the current hook-up culture among many teenagers and adults in our country. Behavior that would have been unthinkable to my grandparents is now considered “normal” by many. Many teenagers and adults get drunk, or high, at parties or bars, and have unplanned sex, sometimes with complete strangers. “Casual sex” is practiced by many. Many women find themselves pregnant with an unwanted baby. Many women abort their unwanted babies. Abortion is big business to those companies and practitioners providing the means to abort unwanted pregnancies.
But the promise of “casual sex” is a lie. Sex is never casual. It always deeply affects those engaging in it with profound physical, emotional, mental, and yes spiritual, effects.
No matter how much we try to deny them and pretend they aren’t there and pretend they don’t matter, the commandments, “Do not commit adultery,” and, “Do not murder,” still stand tall and loom large. They are unshakable. They won’t go away. People who ignore them bring peril upon themselves.
Sometimes it’s Hard
I realize not all abortions occur because of unwanted pregnancies after drunken hookups (though many do). Sometimes it’s more complicated than that.
When my wife was pregnant with our first child, the nurse practitioner at my wife’s OBGYN, who was taking care of my wife, told us that our baby “tested positive” for a certain defect. (Testing “positive” meant that the results of their test indicated that our child had a slightly greater than normal risk of having this particular defect. In fact, our child does not have the defect.) So, our nurse practitioner wanted to do a much more invasive test, which would conclusively inform us if our child had that defect. I asked why we needed to know this information with certainty. “So, what if our baby has (it)? Then what?” Her answer still reverberates in my head: “Well, that’s one of the reasons people choose to have an abortion.” I was horrified. Abortion never was an option for us.
It was hard — really hard — to face the possibility that our child may have a defect. Having a child with a defect would have broken our hearts and, presumably, made our lives much more difficult. But some things are more important than having an easy life. Doing what is right is one of those more important things.
The plain fact is it’s wrong to kill a human being because he or she has a defect. It’s wrong to kill a 10 year-old child, because of a defect. It’s wrong to kill a 1 year-old infant, because of a defect. And it’s wrong to kill a baby in utero, because of a defect.
It’s Not Just About the Babies
Abortion protagonists claim that “pro-lifers” don’t care about women — or even worse — that somehow, we are waging a “war on women.” But that’s not true at all. The truth is we understand something that abortion proponents do not.
No matter how many signs are held up that say, “Trust Women,” no matter how many women scream, “Keep your laws off my body,” no matter how much politicians try to spin it, no matter how much big corporations push it, no matter how much she tries to deny it, or ignore it, or escape it, a woman who has had an abortion knows — deep in her soul — that she has killed her baby. And that causes guilt — lifelong guilt. We would spare women that guilt.
Back in May 2009, I was driving home from work and listening to “Fresh Air,” hosted by Terry Gross, on the radio. Ms. Gross was interviewing Ayelet Waldman. Ms. Waldman is a proponent of abortion, and her mother was a very active abortion protagonist in the 1970s. Terry Gross, in typical Terry Gross fashion, surprised her guest with an unexpected question. Ms. Gross asked Ms. Waldman to describe how she felt when she had an abortion (because of a potential defect) many years earlier. An amazing thing happened. Ms. Waldman started crying right then during the radio broadcast. She explained that talking about the incident brought emotions to the surface that she had buried long ago. She elaborated, “The baby is extracted in pieces from your uterus… It’s horrible. The photographs that you see, that the right-to-lifers show, they’re real photographs. That’s really what it’s like.”
Repent and Believe
I understand that many women who have already had an abortion may read this article. So, I want to conclude with a message of hope.
There is forgiveness. There really is. Christ has promised us that all manner of sin can be forgiven by God. Even the guilt of killing a helpless baby is not beyond the scope of God’s mercy. The sin that causes us the most guilt and shame is a sin that Christ’s blood covers, if, in humility, we ask him for forgiveness. But repentance — or acknowledgment of wrongdoing — is the first step. Forgiveness is to be had for those willing to take that step.
