Tag Archives: Fetus

Normalizing Murder, Part 2

Details of bony structures in 14-week-old fetus from an ultrasound equipment manufacturer.

Last week, we looked at the first eight of sixteen statements phrased as fill-in-the-blank sentences that are showing up on billboards in Cleveland, Ohio supporting the barbaric practice of abortion. Today, I’d like to work through the remaining eight.

  1. “Abortion is  life-saving. “ The irony of this statement would be comical if it weren’t such tragic disinformation. A successful abortion necessarily kills an innocent human. That’s not life-saving; that’s life-destroying. And while there are still cases where carrying the baby to term truly endangers the mother’s life, such as ectopic (tubal) pregnancies or uterine cancer where treatment may kill the baby and non-treatment may kill the mother, these are the exception and make up a minuscule portion of abortions. Interestingly, former US Surgeon General C. Everett Koop said in 1980, “In my thirty-six years in pediatric surgery I have never known of one instance where the child had to be aborted to save the mother’s life.” Even Alan Guttmacher, former president of Planned Parenthood, stated in 1967 that “Today it is possible for almost any patient to be brought through pregnancy alive, unless she suffers from a fatal illness such as cancer or leukemia, and, if so, abortion would be unlikely to prolong, much less save, life.”[1] And genuine life-saving technology has only improved since then, thus further reducing the likelihood of actually needing an abortion.
  2. “Abortion is  a parenting decision. “  If so, then it’s a tragic and often uninformed or misinformed parenting decision. Unfortunately, too many mothers believe the lies that their baby is simply a “clump of cells” or “a parasite”, or “only a potential human”, and make bad, irreversible “parenting” decisions. But parenting is more than just biology. A parent protects, nourishes, and loves their children, and prepares them for adulthood. To have the child killed is antithetical to the common idea of what makes a “good” parent, for it is opposed to a foundational goal of parenting: desiring the good of your children.
  3. “Abortion is  liberty. “  I think this misunderstanding comes from the notion of liberty being unrestrained ability to do anything you desire. That is simply untrue. I am never free to murder my neighbor, nor am I free to steal his car for the fun of it. Liberty is the freedom to do what is right. Freedom of choice does not entail the freedom to choose wrong or to violate someone else’s rights, which is precisely what happens when the unborn baby is deprived of that most fundamental right – the right to one’s own life.
  4. “Abortion is  a second chance. “ The hidden assumption of this statement is that bringing a new life into the world is a) a mistake, and b) one that can simply be erased  like an Etch-a-Sketch via abortion. Even if a baby is “unplanned”, or “inconvenient”, or the result of a one-night-stand, affair, or even a rape – are any of these a good reason to kill an innocent baby? Where is the baby’s first chance to live and make a difference in this world?
  5. “Abortion is  hope. “ Hope achieved at the expense of another’s life is not any kind of genuine hope to offer people, but is only the vice of selfishness repackaged as a virtue. Thinking the deliberate killing of a child brings hope is to assume the child is some kind of anchor holding the mother down, and that abortion can realize the hope of release from such a weighty burden. Yet this goes completely contrary to the beautiful, nurturing nature of motherhood, that routinely sacrifices self for the child. Our next generation isn’t a burden holding us down, but rather our successors that we give a step up to so that they can achieve more than we did, just as we tried to build on what our parents did for us. Abortion actually turns the advancement of civilization on its head.
  6. “Abortion is  health care. “ Calling the ending of someone’s life without their consent “health care” is just as much Orwellian “newspeak” as calling a government propaganda department the “Ministry of Truth”.[2] When the intent of a procedure is to take a healthy living human and make them dead, that is as far from health care as can be conceived.
  7. “Abortion is  sacred. “  This is perhaps the most egregious of the slogans. I’m going to give them the benefit of the doubt and assume the intended meaning here was “entitled to reverence and respect” or “highly valued and important”, and not the religious uses of the word “sacred”. Even so, those are hardly words that should be used to describe what is at best a tragic loss of life, even in the rare cases when a mother’s life is in danger.
  8. “Abortion is  right for me. “ Dear reader, if you are considering an abortion, I hope these previous 7 responses, and the 8 from last week, have helped you see why abortion is not right for you. All of the statements examined these two weeks try to deflect your attention away from one simple question: is the object of discussion an innocent… living… human… person? If it is (and I believe there are good reasons to say it is), then there are no good reasons that can justify killing it.

What are some alternatives to abortion that would be right for you? The times that stretch us beyond what we thought we could withstand are often the times we grow the most. If you don’t feel like you could take care of a baby, consider the generations of women before that opted to push through the trials and raise a kid amidst financial uncertainty, poverty, food scarcity, war, and a host of other struggles. How many of us were “unplanned”, and caused years of sacrifice for our parents? And yet, if that was you, aren’t you glad you got the chance to live? But if your situation really does preclude raising your child, adoption is another option. Is your pregnancy burdensome? As difficult as it may seem, it is a temporary burden, while abortion is an action with permanent consequences. Seek support during this difficult time and persevere until birth so that someone else can offer your child the opportunities you can’t. In closing, everyone comes to this decision with their own story, their own questions, and fears, and concerns. If you’re trying to decide between abortion and giving birth, let me point you to a nationwide toll-free number you can call or text anytime to talk to someone about your specific situation. There is likely a pregnancy resource center near you that may even be able to offer you services like ultrasound, but this number will get you started, wherever you are in the US: 1-800-848-LOVE (5683).


[1] Koop and Guttmacher quoted at http://abort73.com/end_abortion/is_abortion_ever_justified, accessed 2018-01-14. Although I prefer to set eyes on primary sources to confirm a quote is authentic and in context, I was not able to find the sources referenced online or for sale in print. If you have a copy of Guttmacher’s book Abortion–Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow: The Case for Legalized Abortion Now (Berkeley, CA: Diablo Press, 1967), or the May 1980 issue of Moody Monthly  that you would be willing to donate or sell me, please contact me.
[2] George Orwell, 1984. A good read, I might add.

Normalizing Murder, Part 1

Image of fetal face, not from a pro-life website, but from an ultrasound manufacturer. Abortion kills a living human person.

Some billboards are going up in Cleveland promoting abortion. Now, I’m used to the typical lines like “It’s my body” and so on. I can at least understand the confusion with ideas like that; the proponent assumes that just because something is inside one’s body, then it is one’s body. My response is simple – get a DNA test done on the baby (or fetus if you prefer), and if it comes up identical to your DNA, go for it. You would have my blessing to proceed with an abortion, for it would simply be part of your body. Of course, that is an impossibility, for the mother only provides half the chromosomes to the fetus. Therefore it is impossible for it to be part of the mother’s body. From within moments of conception, the baby is a genetically distinct human. But these new billboards are so brazen in their disinformation, that they require a response. The billboards simply show a short fill-in-the-blank sentence, “abortion is _____”, with the blank filled in with one of 16 different false conclusions. As the tragic anniversary of Roe v. Wade approaches this month, and we mourn the loss of nearly 60 million Americans over the last 45 years, let’s look at the first 8 of these faulty arguments this week, and the remaining 8 next week.

  1. “Abortion is  normal. “   The word “normal” can have a technical  meaning in fields like statistics and engineering, but in everyday usage, normal means regular, common, or natural. Induced abortions ended approximately 19% of pregnancies in the US in 2014.[1] Clearly, the regular, natural result of a pregnancy, if not interrupted, is childbirth, not abortion.
  2. “Abortion is  necessary. “  Abortion is certainly not necessary, in general. If the human race is to continue to survive, childbirth is necessary, but not abortion. I’m guessing – hoping – they are referring to the specific cases where the mother’s life is in imminent danger. Is there any other case where the idea of a necessary death could even be contemplated? Even when presented with the apparent need to kill one to save the other, versus losing both, it is still a decision of last resort arrived at after exhausting other options. But those cases are the exception even in times and places of poor medical care. In light of  current medical advances, there are becoming fewer and fewer cases where a nonabortive solution can’t be found. The primary case is ectopic (tubal) pregnancy, which is an almost guaranteed death sentence for both mother and child if allowed to proceed, although even in that dire situation, there are a handful of cases where mother and baby both survived an ectopic pregnancy (with 3 in the UK between 1999 and 2005). However, these are an extremely small percentage of abortions. If this is the scenario pro-abortion activists want to appeal to, then OK; let’s ban all abortions except where it is actually necessary. Since the vast majority of abortions are elective, I suspect the argument for necessity is simply a bluff needing to be called.
  3. “Abortion is  your right. “  While abortion or a right to privacy are never mentioned in our Constitution or Declaration of Independence, the right to life is recognized and protected in both documents.[2] But since the abortion supporters bring up the subject of rights, it’s worth reminding everyone of something  R.C. Sproul used to say: nobody has the right to do what is wrong. It’s also been said in various ways since the 1800’s that the right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins. Rights come with responsibilities, and if your right to do something is reasonably restricted when it would only harm another person, how much more should that alleged “right” be restricted when it would kill an innocent person?
  4. “Abortion is  gender equality. “ This is an interesting one because sex-selective abortion kills more females than males worldwide. After years of preferentially aborting baby girls, areas like China and India are beginning to see substantial deficits in the number of women compared to men. Just from a practical standpoint, it really makes no sense for feminist women to support a procedure that actually kills more women than men worldwide. But then today’s feminists aren’t like the real pioneering feminists who were staunchly opposed to abortion.
  5. Abortion is  a  family value. “ To say that killing a family member is somehow a family value is simply bewildering. Enough said.
  6. “Abortion is  good medicine. “ Actually, abortion violates the Hippocratic Oath, from whence we get that most basic, founding medical principle of “Do no harm,” the idea that doctors should be about healing their patients, not harming them. But perhaps you might think Hippocrates was only referring to those who had been born. After all, he did live 2400 years ago and couldn’t possibly know what we know now about babies from genetics and embryology (which has only strengthened the argument against abortion, by the way). You might be tempted to think that, except that Hippocrates specifically prohibited a doctor from performing abortions in his famous Oath. Yes, it was bad medicine back then, and it’s even clearer now that things like ultrasound have opened a window into the womb.
  7. “Abortion is  safer than childbirth. “  This is based on the presupposition that the mother is the only patient involved. When we correctly understand that the unborn baby is a living human person, then we understand that every successful abortion kills at least one of the patients (and sometimes both).
  8. “Abortion is  a blessing. “ This is perhaps the most selfish of all the billboard slogans, for depriving someone of their very life, without their consent, is only a blessing if you don’t want that person alive. This slogan perverts the traditional view of children as a blessing and substitutes their death as the blessing.

Abortion is often a sensitive and emotional subject, but that is because the stakes are so high. It’s either no big deal and all these billboards trying to justify it are needless, or the human race has killed 1.4 billion of its most defenseless members without provocation – just since 1980 [3] – and it’s actually the most important issue facing humanity. There really is no in-between. If the unborn baby is a living human person, innocent of any wrongdoing, then abortion is murder, and abortionists are not doctors but serial killers. And if we continue to ignore the holocaust happening right in front of us, our generation will be just as shamed in future history books as the households of American slave owners and the Germans who lived near the Nazi death camps and looked the other way.


[1] http://abort73.com/abortion_facts/us_abortion_statistics/
[2] Preamble to the US Declaration of Independence, and the 14th amendment to the US Constitution.
[3] See www.numberofabortions.com for more tragic abortion stats.