Tag: human life

Bridging the Gap on Abortion

Roger MitchellLeave a comment

I wrote and posted this article in 2019 on another blog which is no longer in service. Only slight editing has been done. My views have not changed.

Abortion is a polarizing subject. I do not know anyone who claims to have “no opinion” on the issue. Instead, most individuals are vehemently in favor of abortion on demand OR they are adamantly opposed to it.  The argument is almost always one-sided: a woman’s right to terminate her pregnancy OR the right to life of the unborn child. Very few people ever bother to ask, though, why do we have to choose between the woman and the child. Why does it have to be one or the other?

Abortion, as it is practiced today, pits the woman against her child and the child against her mother. For women considering abortion, the unborn fetus can easily become an enemy. What are the reasons WHY a woman would bring herself to the point where she is willing to destroy her own offspring. Here are a few examples.  

  1. Women of color comprise a huge number of abortions performed each year in the US. Perhaps as many as 40 out of 100 black pregnancies end in abortion. The odds are good that these women are unmarried, reliant on food stamps and HUD to survive, and already have other children which they are trying to raise.

“Minority women constitute only about 13% of the female population (age 15-44) in the United States, but they underwent approximately 36% of the abortions. According to the Alan Guttmacher Institute, black women are more than 5 times as likely as white women to have an abortion. On average, 1,876 black babies are aborted every day in the United States.”—( http://www.blackgenocide.org/black.html)

  • Another group which is represented disproportionately is college age women, who are attempting to gain an education in the hopes of being successful in a chosen career. Pregnancy is a roadblock to that hope. Most colleges do not have any program to help them maintain the academic load and carry a child at the same time. The woman’s “choice” is between her career and her child.

“No woman should be forced to choose between sacrificing her education or career plans and suffering through a humiliating, invasive procedure and sacrificing her child. We refuse to choose®. Abortion represents a failure to listen and respond to the unmet needs of women.”—(https://feministsforlife.org/herstory/)

  • In addition, we need to consider the number of times that a woman is coerced and pressured into undergoing an abortion by her boyfriend, husband, or father.  Men have a huge influence in this decision. 

“If legal abortion has given women more choice, it has also given men more choice as well. They now have a potent new weapon in the old business of manipulating and abandoning women…. That men have long coerced women into abortion when it suits their purposes is well-known but rarely mentioned.”—(http://www.theunchoice.com/articles/howcommoniscoercion.htm)

It is undeniable that many women face huge obstacles as they consider their options when they find out they are pregnant. We need to start seeing them, not as selfish murderers, but as they truly are—probably young, maybe alone, less than rich, confused, afraid, unsure. They may not believe they have any other “choice”. They may not have the means and personal strength to carry the pregnancy to term and then adopt the baby out. The chances are that they are not aborting out of pure selfishness, but out of perceived necessity. This does not excuse the abortion in any way, but it does help to explain it.

Not only do we have to consider the women who abort, but also those who are killed and thrown away—unborn human beings who never asked to be conceived in the first place. Most abortions do not occur because of fetal deformities or the physical health and well-being of the mother. Statistics from the State of Florida in 2018 show that out of 70, 083 abortions, only 1, 004 were done for the reasons of rape, incest, fetal deformity, or to save the life of the woman. The rest were elective—by choice.1

These instances do occur, but they are rare. They constitute a very small number of abortions and should not be used as justification to allow the killing of unborn babies by anyone for any reason. The blanket allowance of abortion is even more cruel than a blanket prohibition would be and there are millions of reasons why a pregnancy should not be terminated—all of them live human beings.

For too long, this issue has been framed in a confrontational way: woman vs. child. One, but not the other. Either/or, but not both. We must change the way we debate this issue. We must recognize that for every abortion, there are at least two victims—the woman and the child. We must not only save the life of the unborn, but also give the woman the means and support she needs to continue the pregnancy, give birth, and either raise the child herself or turn that responsibility over to someone else. We must become a society which honors and esteems human life at all ages—19 weeks from conception or 19 years from birth. If this means we are inconvenienced ourselves, so be it.

Abortion is a symptom of an underlying disease, a reflection of the fact that, as a society, we have not met the needs of women. It also shows us that, as a society, we would rather address our problems violently than face them responsibly. The most defenseless members of our human family suffer and die as a result. Both the woman and the child deserve better.

  1. The original citation could not be found, but you can find similar numbers here. ↩︎

Without Question: The Beginning of Human Life

Roger Mitchell11 Comments

This is a reprint of an article I posted in 2019 on a blog which was dedicated exclusively to the abortion issue. It has been closed and is no longer available, although I have all the articles saved. I am considering restarting this as a Substack in its own right.

Within the abortion debate, one of the most pervasive tactics of the pro-abortion side has been to paint the unborn child in a dehumanizing manner. Consequently, the unborn child became a fetus [i], the embryo became a clump of cells, protoplasm, uterine content, etc. In addition, groups such as Planned Parenthood use the technology of ultrasound, not to show women a true picture of their unborn baby, but to deceive [ii] them into proceeding with a planned abortion. Deception and dissembling have been hallmarks of the abortion lobby from the very beginning. In fact, their tactics resemble those of a State or society which seeks to “dehumanize” its enemies [iii], i.e., especially in the time prior to and amid a war, political conflict, or social reconstruction [iv].

This has led to a considerable amount of confusion regarding the humanity of the unborn embryo or fetus. When does human life start? Is the fetus a human being? If not, when does it become one? These questions are all separate from the ones concerning person-hood, which is not the thrust of this article. In fact, the question of the beginning of human life and the time that life attains person-hood are two separate questions and must be addressed by different methods. Person-hood is a matter of belief, opinion, persuasion, subjectivity, etc., and is susceptible to a wide variety of influences—religious, philosophical, social, financial, etc.

There is only one qualified discipline which can state emphatically (and has hard evidence to back it up) when a new human life begins—embryonic science. This is strictly a scientific matter and science has clearly stated what so many believe or feel to be true.

“…scientifically something very radical occurs between the processes of gametogenesis and fertilization, the change from a simple part of one human being (i.e., a sperm) and a simple part of another human being (i.e., an oocyte, usually referred to as an “ovum” or “egg”), which simply possess “human life”, to a new, genetically unique, newly existing, individual, whole living human being (a single-cell embryonic human zygote). That is, upon fertilization, parts of human beings have actually been transformed into something very different from what they were before; they have been changed into a single, whole human being. During the process of fertilization, the sperm and the oocyte cease to exist as such, and a new human being is produced.” –Dianne M. Irving, M.A., Ph.D [v]

In other words, what Dr. Irving has said is that when a sperm cell and an egg cell fuse (conception), a new, unique, individual human being has begun. The sperm and the egg were individual human cells before the fusion, after that, they are something completely different—a live human being which had never existed before. Of this, there can be no doubt. The life of every human begins at conception. This is unassailable, indisputable fact. [Ed. Note: The science is settled.]

Dr. Irving goes on to explain (and goes into intense detail) why a human being comes into existence at conception. She lists and destroys several myths which have been promoted over the years and decades concerning this issue and never equivocates from the main premise–that a human being comes to life at the moment of conception.

“The issue is not when does human life begin, but rather when does the life of every human being begin.”—Dianne M. Irving [vi]

From the moment of conception, a human being exists within the womb–zygote, blastocyst, embryo, fetus—right up to the point of the delivery as a newborn baby. At every stage of development, this is a live human being. Whether he is a person or not doesn’t matter. Whether she has rights or not is irrelevant. He is a human being. She is a human being. As such, abortion is a procedure which literally kills a human being. Abortion has probably killed hundreds of millions of human beings in the 20th century alone.

Every person who is alive today, every person who has ever lived, started out in exactly the same way—as a newly conceived zygote with all the genetic material necessary to become the persons we are today. We should be grateful that our mothers didn’t simply decide to throw us away.

[i] The term “fetus” generates a lot of heat on both sides of the aisle. The pro-abortionists use it almost exclusively and refuse to use the terms unborn baby or child for obvious reasons. The pro-lifers prefer “baby” or “child” and generally avoid using the term fetus, again for obvious reasons. Fetus, though, is simply a Latin word which can have many meanings, however, all of them are related to reproduction and refer to very young, immature offspring. It is medically correct and refers to the stage of human development in the womb from embryo (about 8 weeks) until birth. I do not generally make distinctions between fetus, baby, and child, but use the terms interchangeably.

[ii] https://www.liveaction.org/news/planned-parenthood-abortion-deceptive-ultrasound/

[iii] https://www.npr.org/2011/03/29/134956180/criminals-see-their-victims-as-less-than-human

[iv] Nazi Germany, for instance, successfully used this tactic against the Jews. Today, political parties attempt to divide the electorate into what are basically enemy camps.

[v] https://www.princeton.edu/~prolife/articles/wdhbb.html  Dianne N. Irving, M.A., Ph.D (International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy 1999, 19:3/4:22-36

[vi] Ibid. Section B, Fact 1.