The Issue of Abortion

The issue of abortion has taken on new life in recent months. There has been a wave of radical movement in this arena. The Governor of Virginia recently advocated for abortion even at the point of birth. The suggestions were made that a baby could be delivered and set on a table while the doctor and the mother deliberated over whether it was in everyone’s best interest to allow the child to live or die. One legislator from the south reasoned something to the effect of, “They’re going to die anyway. It would be best to kill them before they cost any more than they have.”

In response to this wave, there has been another on the more conservative, life-giving side. Alabama recently signed a bill making abortion illegal. Other states are working on similar legislation. My understanding is that the hope is one of these bills will make their way to the Supreme Court and allow for the possibility of overturning Roe V Wade.

In the midst of this, I read an argument from a young lady I know who attended our church as a child. She argued that while a baby in the womb is human, it is not immoral to abort it within the first and second trimester because, as she said it, it could not survive outside its mother’s womb. She likened it to a person who is braindead but artificially kept alive through life support. She claimed that, just as it is not immoral to “pull the plug” on that life, it would not be sinful to pull the baby out of its mother’s womb. It is, after all, just a life support system. She did argue that, once the baby could live outside of the uterus, it should be illegal to abort it.

I commend this young lady for taking the stand that the unborn are human. She stands where few of her age are willing to stand. I commend her too for standing for the life of the baby after it reaches the third trimester.

Her reasoning, however, for the morality of aborting the child in the earlier trimesters is wrong for at least two reasons:

One, in the case of the brain-dead person she set as an example, the chance of life is considered impossible. So long as there is the hope of recovery, medical personnel would wish to fight for the life of the person. Even when it is determined that life is impossible, it is still a matter of debate how moral it would be to, as she put it, “pull the plug.” In the case of the unborn, even in the earliest stages, the question of life is not on the table. Given the opportunity, the child will almost certainly live. Aborting a baby just because it cannot live outside of the womb is not much different than killing a person just because he cannot live without food and water.

Secondly, the act of “pulling the plug” is generally done in the most humane way possible. Loved ones gather tears are shed, much deliberation has taken place, every possible means of saving the person has been made and, when it is determined that it is no use, they are lovingly allowed to slip into eternity. This is not the case of the unborn. Unwanted, even hated by those involved, a team executioners are hired to kill the baby in the womb, always in the most brutal of manner: it is burned to death with salt water, or its brains are sucked out of its skull, and its body ripped apart limb by limb.

There is no moral connection that can possibly be made between loving allowing the body of one who is dead to slip into eternity and violently slaying an innocent, living, feeling human being and ripping it from the one place on this planet it should have been safe.

Marvin McKenzie

In the fields