This week the United States Senate rejected the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act, a bill that would have required medical staff to provide life-saving care to infants who survive abortion. The incredible fact that this is even a conversation that we are willing to have and that U.S. lawmakers would stand against requiring care for born-alive infants, highlights the fact that abortion is about so much more than the mothers right to choose or confusion about when life truly begins.
In a country that holds as a founding principle the “Inalienable Rights of Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness,” we must seriously consider why these rights would be denied to the most helpless among us! Although this debate has long been framed as either political or religious, we need to see it for what it really is and ask the question, “What is behind the obsession that so many have with taking the life of, now at least, even those who have been born?”
Much has been said on this topic and I am in no way seeking to provide an exhaustive argument against abortion, but for perspective, here are three things to consider:
First, we are living at a time that increasingly diminishes the role of personal responsibility. It is no secret to anyone who follows the news or visits a social media site that the politically correct and mainstream response to anything that happens is to blame someone else. There was a time in the history of our nation that we opposed the idea of victimhood. We believed that, even when we did not cause the circumstances that we find ourselves in, we were still responsible for how we respond to what has happened. That day has largely passed. We now, or so it seems, relishes the idea of being a victim (even to our own bad decisions) and in no way bear the responsibility for any part of what is happening. “I am not responsible for this child that I have given birth to, so I, therefore, have no responsibility to care for it.”
Second, the individual is more important than anything or anyone else. This is just the next step in the logic of our first point, but the prevailing belief says something like this: “My life, my actions, and my future are more important than those of anyone else. If I must hurt you to get my way, that is my right.” The word we use in our house for this type of behavior is “selfish”. It is the obsession with self to the neglect of others. When we teach our children and nurture a society with the idea that life is, or should be, all about you, we then make it ok to take the life of a child that will make this life about them. The demand for abortion at any stage of development is a declaration that nothing, not even another human, should get in “my” way.
Third, there is no intrinsic value to life. I believe that this philosophy is really at the heart of the “when does life begin” argument. The beginning of life, according to this idea, has nothing to do with heartbeat or brainwaves, developmental stage or viability outside of the womb. Life, when we believe that humans are not born with value, does not really begin until the human begins to contribute and become valuable. Clearly, the rejection of a bill that would protect life outside of the womb demonstrates that the decades-old debate about the beginning of life is not sincere. No human really has value until they make themselves valuable which will happen well after physical birth. Where there is no intrinsic value to life there is no point at which abortion can definitively be stopped.
So, what are the consequences of all of this to society at large? When abortion for any reason and at any stage is generally accepted by a society every other area of life will also be affected.
Suicide will increase because when value only comes to those who are recognized as valuable, hopelessness will overwhelm those who fail to understand their own intrinsic worth.
Homicides and violent crime will take place with alarming regularity and audacity because children are raised to believe, and society accepts, that when another human stands in the way of getting what you want, it is perfectly acceptable to remove them and move on.
Euthanasia must also find acceptance at the point that life no longer adds value to the greater, judged very subjectively, good.
Drug use and abuse will rise year over year as the darkness of a self-absorbed, never responsible culture touches every area of life.
A society that celebrates the taking of a child’s life is a society that must bear the consequences that come along with it. The most American thing one can do is to stand up for the rights of those who cannot stand up for themselves and until we collectively decide to defend the unborn, we will continue to move further away from our founding principles. We must decide that enough is enough and that we are no longer willing to be a nation that attaches an age to individual liberty and the right to life!
Originally Published March 2020
Photo by Aditya Romansa on Unsplash