Walking in the Light, April 5, 2009
Walking in the Light
Worldwide, there are approximately 46 million abortions conducted each year; with 1,370,000 abortions occurring annually in the United States alone. Worldwide, there are approximately 126,000 abortions conducted each day, with 3,753 of those occurring in the U.S.; that’s 156 per hour, 2 per minute. A baby’s life is terminated every thirty seconds around the clock, 7 days a week, year in and year out! Each year in America, 2 out of every 100 women aged 15-44 have an abortion. Forty-eight percent of them have had at least one previous abortion and sixty-one percent have had a previous birth. In the U.S., forty-three percent of women will have had at least one abortion by the age of 45.
What happened? How did we ever get to this point? How did the taking of innocent life become so commonplace and so routine and so legal? We tend to think of abortion as something modern. However, life was cheap in many ancient cultures. Unwanted or deformed infants were routinely exposed to the elements and left to die in Greek and Roman times. Abortion was practiced among many ancient pagans. It has been practiced by barbarians since very early in our world’s history. But as time progressed, civilized nations have generally outlawed the practice. In fact, before 1973, laws in nearly all 50 states opposed abortion. However, on January 22, 1973 nine supreme court justices issued a death decree that lives in infamy. Roe v. Wade, as it’s commonly referred to, was a monumental decision that gave pregnant women the right to choose whether or not their child should live, and made it legal for a physician to invade the womb and deliberately terminate the life of an unborn child. Under the Supreme Court’s ruling, women, in consultation with their doctors, have a constitutionally protected right to have an abortion in the early stages of pregnancy—that is, before viability—free from government interference. This decision eliminated any protection for an unborn child’s life in favor of a mother’s right to privacy.
Of all the abortions that occur in this country, 1,370,000 per year, barely 1% of them are due to rape or incest. Thankfully, the likelihood of a woman becoming pregnant from rape is very low. Pregnancy occurs in only about 1 in 4,000 rapes. Normal pregnancy rates are about 1 in every 1,000 copulations. Likewise, abortions in order to save the mother are extremely rare as well. “Protection of the mother as an excuse for an abortion is a smoke screen. Former U.S. Surgeon General C. Everett Koop has gone on record as saying, “In my 36 years of pediatric surgery, I have never known of one instance where the child had to be aborted to save the mother’s life. The doctor will either induce labor or perform a Caesarean section. His intention is to save the life of both the mother and the baby. The baby’s life is never willfully destroyed because the mother’s life is in danger.” All of this means that the overwhelming majority of abortions (97 to 98%) that occur in this country are not the result of rape or incest or risk to the mother’s health, but rather they are the result of pure selfishness.
Abortion is the murder of innocent life, plain and simple. It is immoral, unethical and many times barbaric. It is the destruction of God-given life, and pro-choice is just a license to kill. When we establish that it is innocent life that is taken in an abortion, then we have a victim; therefore, the abortion debate is over. No more controversy! No more debate! Pro-choice loses all validity when a child has to die!
Chris McCurley