A Person's a Person No Matter How Small

--Janice Graham

We've been listening  some reactions to New York's evil abortion law and Virginia's attempt to pass the same sort of thing. It appears that even those who are generally pro-abortion are cringing at it. After all, they say, it's obviously a baby at the time of birth. So, yes full term abortion would be murder. But not say, during the first trimester. Let's take this supposed logic apart.

First, we never hear anybody talk about how the woman chose to have sexual intercourse in the first place. This is the case in the great majority of abortions. (Pregnancies aborted because of the health of the mother, rape, and incest are very rare indeed. More on that later.) Yes, sexual intercourse is most often a choice for both men and women. Sexual intercourse is the one choice that makes babies. Making a baby can be a result of sexual intercourse. Both the male and the female old enough to have sex know this fact from the start, and yes, it's the female, not the man, who is physically affected by pregnancy, which is just the way life is. If she, or they, makes the choice to stop the baby's life, that is her or their second choice. Yes, the pro-choice movement should more accurately be called pro-second-choice. And people assume it's the woman's choice alone to abort. But if the father is involved in the decision to abort, he knows, too, that this is a second choice he is making. The first was to engage in sexual relations, you know, that thing that makes babies.

Notice how no one talks about that first choice. They just fly off the handle saying how unfair it is that a woman should have to carry and give birth to a baby if or when she doesn't want to. We have even heard pregnancy/motherhood called a form of slavery. Really? The pregnancy? News flash. In the great majority of cases, the baby grows automatically in the protected safety of the mother's womb. She  really doesn't have to do anything extra or different to make the baby grow. There is the possibility of morning sickness, which can be all sorts of bad, and it might get uncomfortable toward the end, but that doesn't sound like slavery. After all, the woman chose to do the thing that made the baby. We are not talking about rape-induced pregnancy (very rare), so nobody forced her. So no, that is not even anything like slavery. It's just a fact of life that she knew from the start. Are they talking about motherhood? Is motherhood slavery? Again, no, because the woman chose to do the thing that made her a mother. And if she doesn't want to be a mother, there are countless infertile couples dying to have a family. She can give the baby away to some extremely grateful couple of her choice and walk away free as a bird. That doesn't sound like slavery either.

Granted, pregnancy and birth may be inconvenient, scary, even painful. I carried and gave birth to seven children, including a pair of 7 pound twins, some quite easily, some with difficulty. But this is what life is.  On the one side it can be inconvenient, scary, even painful. There is no way around that in some form or other. All of us came to be on this earth under those very same conditions. Hopefully the woman who finds herself inconveniently, scarily, even painfully pregnant learns a lesson or two, one of which is that sex is serious. If you choose to participate in it, there are all sorts of consequences. One of them is that you might get pregnant and have a baby, whether you want to or planned to at the time or not.This is a biological fact about the physically matured human female.


Second, people talk about some "gray area" in the course of human life between when a human has no value and when that human suddenly has great value The fact that people cannot pinpoint this moment in time, and admit that they cannot, is highly problematic. That judgment becomes an arbitrary one, subject to all sorts of whims and conditions, including the state or country you live in. Thus, the whole human race is tossed to and fro. That's because that supposed gray area between non-human and human is not only arbitrarily decided by anyone who happens to be in charge, but imaginary.Yes, a human being begins at conception, or as Dr. Seuss put it, "a person's a person no matter how small."

Now, as to the very rare cases of pregnancies that come about by rape or incest, at first glance in
these days when abortion is commonplace, this may appear the thing to do. We might especially worry about the pregnant female being a minor. After all, rape victimizes an innocent female. It's a horrible crime that greatly affects her life and it's not her fault she got pregnant. But it's not the new human's fault either. Perhaps it is best to let nature take its course, seeing as how abortion is yet another violent act against humanity. Pregnancy and birth are natural, whereas abortion is not. Such a  female, pregnant by an act of rape, who has an abortion may someday regret it because abortion is also an act of violence---to the death---against an innocent being, while the one who gives the child a life has just let nature take its course and need never regret it. As for incest the same logic applies. Any human life that results from these situations is not at fault and is valuable nonetheless.Same with a baby with defects. Human life is human life, and valuable in all its conditions. If we stray from this ideal, anything can take its place. Anyone can be deemed unnecessary or burdensome.

Life is complex. Life can get messy. But whether people like it or not, life is irrefutably life, amazing, inexplicable, and of immeasurable value. Abortion is the most blatant example of what happens when the current human powers that be decide to mock and defy the gift of procreation, step by step, until we cannot deny that at any stage needless abortion is an egregious self-loathing act of man's inhumanity to man and rebellion against God and Creation.