Hallelujah. Is it possible that we have finally advanced as human beings to the point that we can acknowledge that a very small, developing human lives in the uterus until he/she is born? Science has known this for years and years - and once ultrasounds came along no one could honestly say that "it's just a blob of tissue" for months....so the argument changed to whether or not they have the right to be allowed to live. Yes, they do. Or have we gone backwards?
There are people I've known my whole life who are very concerned with human rights - but not those humans. They say "it's none of my business what someone else does with their own body" - and I would completely agree. But they are talking about disposing of another human's body. This is the biggest human rights issue of our time. Can we, at last, move forward as compassionate human beings without this hypocrisy hanging over our heads?
Some religious leaders want to argue about when the soul enters the body. It seems to me (and I'm only human) that the soul is the spark of life that keeps the new body growing. When it stops growing, the spark leaves - and that's a miscarriage, not an abortion. People who want evil (yes, slaughtering a completely vulnerable, innocent being is evil) to continue in the name of "freedom" want to scare folks into believing that a woman who suffers a miscarrige will be accused of aborting her child. Fear is such a common tactic. I hate to acknowledge the other ugly truth - that some people will say "who's going to pay for all these babies? who's going to raise them?"....giving away that they know there's a baby involved - they just don't care, because their priorities are not human compassion, but economical and financial. There IS enough for everybody in this world. There is no scarcity. We simply don't use our resources wisely.
We have come so far, fellow humans. We not only are eradicating slavery and injustice wherever it crops up on the planet - we have acknowledged our fellow creatures - cats, dogs, horses, etc - as sentient beings worthy of protection. We prosecute abuse against animals, as we should.
To continue to ignore the right of a human to live because their life is dependent on another human is intellectual dishonesty. It is to say "follow the science - until it takes you where I don't want you to go".
We need to do much more than make abortion illegal - it needs to be unthinkable. We need to expand our empathy, our compassion, our resources and our love to any woman in a crisis pregnancy.
Mother Teresa said it so much better than I ever could:
"America needs no words from me to see how your decision in Roe v. Wade has deformed a great nation. The so-called right to abortion has pitted mothers against their children and women against men. It has sown violence and discord at the heart of the most intimate human relationships. It has aggravated the derogation of the father's role in an increasingly fatherless society. It has portrayed the greatest of gifts -- a child -- as a competitor, an intrusion, and an inconvenience. It has nominally accorded mothers unfettered dominion over the independent lives of their physically dependent sons and daughters. And, in granting this unconscionable power, it has exposed many women to unjust and selfish demands from their husbands or other sexual partners. Human rights are not a privilege conferred by government. They are every human being's entitlement by virtue of his humanity. The right to life does not depend, and must not be declared to be contingent, on the pleasure of anyone else, not even a parent or a sovereign."
It is outrageous that a country founded on the rights to life, liberty and happiness ever allowed such an abomination to endure for even a few decades. It's far past time to right this wrong.
