I submitted the following comments in response to a recent (spring of 2002) letter to the editor of our local newspaper that supported abortion:

 

“The justification for abortion that not "every fetus grows to perfection, both physically and intellectually" is an argument without end.  The criteria for allowing a child to be aborted can very easily be extended to euthanasia and genocide.  Abortion is just the beginning, its methods in determining the value of a human life are simply a question of the impact of that life on the one making the choice.

 

The arguments for abortion tend to view the aborted child as a known quantity.  Quality of life and ability to achieve are believed to be understood to such an extent that abortion is justified.  But life is not known.  Pre-determining the quality of a child's life overlooks the preciousness of life itself.  Life is the commodity of value, not its quality nor its completeness.

 

The argument that the parents would be unable to care for the child fails also to consider the lengthy waiting lines for children by those desperate to adopt.  There are many who wish to raise a child but are unable to. There is no excuse why one's inability to care should deprive an other that same opportunity.  To simply abort a child without exploring this possibility is selfish in the extreme.

 

Abortion is wrong not simply because it offends our sensibilities or our religious beliefs (which is reason enough) but because a fellow human being dies.  Abortion is murder and lives are being lost, not only those of the aborted children who never have the chance to enjoy the world given to them by God, but also our lives who permit such atrocity to continue.  We have been called to a higher purpose than this. Let our voices be heard in defence of the defenceless.”

 

To the above I could say in addition that abortion is given all types of pleasant names behind which the fact that a human being is being murdered may be hidden. Concepts such as “emergency contraception,” “pro-choice,” “a woman’s right to choose,” all sound magnificent and modern and successfully convey the impression that those who oppose abortion are backwards and ignorant. Having been defined in such a way those who oppose abortion may safely be accused of standing in the way of the rights of women to do with their body what they please. As though that which grows within her is actually a part of her body in the same way that she her hair or her fingernails are. What is ignored by its supporters is the fact that the child which has been terminated would have resulted in a person capable of independent life if no action had been taken; the child is not and never had been a part of the woman’s body but has had a body of its own which differs from the mother’s only in its state of development. The only way in which the child could be considered to be part of the mother’s body would have been as a parasite feeding off of its host.

 

At the time of this writing the number of lives that have been ended would exceed the population of Canada; an entire nation that was never given the chance to exist, all for a woman’s right to choose (to murder her child).