Abortion Not About Terminating Pregnancy, It’s Killing a BabyImagine that medicine allowed doctors to easily and safely remove babies from the womb long before birth and put them in some sort of artificial womb to complete their development. Now ask yourself if this technology would completely remove the market for killing the unborn.
Answer? No. Why? Because, as it is generally used in America, abortion is not about stopping a nine-month pregnancy, despite euphemisms used to suggest as much. It is about killing the child.
If the child was allowed to live, the desired “autonomy” of those who are choosing to kill him or her would be “infringed” by the life-long chores of child-rearing. While you hear lots of talk about “a woman’s right to choose” because “her body is her choice,” any experienced mother can tell you that the nine months of pregnancy are not likely to be the most difficult time of motherhood.
Compared to the nine months immediately following pregnancy—with the constant late-night feedings, hours of pacing hallways with a colicky baby, and various other indignities and burdens of young motherhood (like finding that almost all your clothing has been baptized by one end of the baby or the other)—pregnancy is often preferable. And don’t get me started on the Terrible Twos, or get my parents started on the even-more Terrible Teens (for the record, their stories are largely apocryphal). While, of course, there are difficult pregnancies, Planned Parenthood hardly limits its services to those, does it?
Pro-abort rhetoric gives the game away. Arguments about ensuring there are “no unwanted children” and that young women should not be burdened with raising a child when they could be going to college are solely concerned with children, not pregnancy.
Similarly, in her Gonzales v. Carhart dissent, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg posited that unless women can have access to partial-birth abortion to free them from motherhood’s natural place as “the center of home and family life,” they cannot “participate equally in the economic and social life of the Nation” or “realize their full potential.” Again, this argument, which suggests that only women who can choose abortion achieve full womanhood, attacks the existence of children, not the temporal burden of pregnancy.
Reality also reveals that the primary goal of abortion is a dead child, not a “terminated pregnancy.” It became sufficiently common for babies to survive an abortionist’s in-womb attentions only to be intentionally suffocated or otherwise killed outside the womb that states and the federal government began enacting Born-Alive Infant Protection laws.
Similarly, the rise in sex-selective abortions—where unborn girls are being killed by families who would rather dedicate child-rearing resources to a boy—has prompted widespread concern about more than a hundred million “missing” women worldwide. The problem has become sufficiently acute in the United States that Rep. Trent Franks (R-Ariz.) even proposed legislation to ban it.
In another chilling example, parents successfully sued their doctor for not recommending abortion of their disabled son, winning $4.5 million because they were saddled with the expenses of caring for him. Their complaint was not about carrying the boy for a full pregnancy term, but about missing the concurrent nine month “open-season” given by the Supreme Court to those wishing to avoid caring for their children later in life.
Another way to see the gap between pro-abortion rhetoric and abortion’s true purpose is to look at a question of bio-ethics. Ethicists have recognized that a result which may appear immoral may not be when the bad result was not the goal but the undesired-though-necessary consequence of doing a good thing. For example, where unavoidable, removing a fatally cancerous uterus to save the life of a mother is moral even when doing so will have the undesired side-effect of causing her baby in the uterus to die. If the mother could both save her baby and her life, she would. (In fact, she may even try to “terminate the pregnancy” by keeping the baby alive through some type of early induction and intensive care.) But if she cannot, saving the only life that is savable is morally permissible. Her goal is to save life, not end it, and the death of the baby is a tragic and undesired outcome.
By contrast, the goal of an abortion is a dead baby. An abortion that ends the pregnancy but not the child’s life is known by the abortion industry as a “failed abortion.”
In the interests of honesty, then, let’s dispense with euphemism “terminating the pregnancy.” Abortion is about killing children, about providing “autonomy” from post-birth children and attendant child-rearing responsibilities. That is where the line is and that is what those who favor abortion must defend.
http://www.lifenews.com/2011/11/02/abortion-not-about-terminating-pregnancy-its-killing-a-baby/
