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Roe’s Legacy
Roe v. Wade was decided in 1973, one year after I graduated from high school. For nearly two centuries in our history, unborn children were recognized as members of the human race with the same right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness as any other person. Roe changed all that. Unborn babies became fetuses, parasites, bits of protoplasm completely bereft of any rights at all. In the last 43 years, over 60 million fetuses have been aborted in the US alone and, of that 60 million, 18 million were black. Worldwide, an estimate of nearly 1.5 billion babies have been aborted since the Roe decision pushed the green light for the US in 1973.
How important are these figures? Since 1973 there have been approximately 158 million live births reported in the US. (Stay with me now, dear reader, there is math.) That means there have been 218 million US pregnancies in the US reported since Roe was decided. Of those pregnancies, a full 27 percent were aborted. Put another way, more than one in four children conceived in the US since Roe have been destroyed, are lost and forgotten.
The numbers: 60,000,000 lives lost. How is this not the greatest tragedy of the last half-century? How is this not the most horrific loss of life ever in the recorded history of mankind? How is this not suicide of the species?
I can’t believe that the Left, those self-professed fonts of human empathy, cannot see this. Do they really push political war over the right to kill off their own children?
If good is to survive and justice is to be served, the practice of abortion must end. We’ll let history be the judge of those who claim otherwise.
Published in General
This can only be fixed with sex robots.
Quite a few “stock up on abortions” comments. Disgusting. Old Scratch is showing his cards.
This came up earlier this month and I admit it deserves much more thought, modeling/analysis, and publicity than I have the capacity to give. I do believe an honest discussion about it would shed some not too flattering light on many aspects of Democrat and moderate Republican politics. (Why does the name Renee Ellmers come to mind?)
http://www.lifeissues.net/writers/tay/tay_03foundingfather.html
The short version is that American law adopted many precedents from English common law at the founding. According to common law and general jurisprudence at the time, life was considered to start at the “quickening” when a mother could first feel the baby moving in her womb. That occurs somewhere between weeks 15-20 of pregnancy, so terminating a pregnancy (using various medicinal preparations) before that was not considered a crime.
To be fair, states did start passing laws prohibiting abortion from conception onward starting about 50 years after the founding.
I disagree. As you say, women have intuitively known since time immemorial that something was alive inside of them from conception onward. And science knew it, too: between farm animals and autopsies of women who died during their first trimester of pregnancy, it was common knowledge that the fetus already resembles a fully-formed human well before “quickening” occurs.
So while the science has certainly advanced our understanding of fetal development greatly, the basic facts were already clear enough. In other words, it was a moral choice, not ignorance, that informed the consensus definition of when life began.
For the record, I’m pro-life but anti-romanticization of human nature.
It’s foolish to lionize the morality of the founders as superior to ours when many of them owned human slaves. Like us, they were fallen beings. That doesn’t mean we should relegate them to the trash heap of history, but we also shouldn’t put them on a moral pedestal.
More to the point of this thread, I’m not convinced that there has ever been a society in which a vast majority of citizens considered a zygote at day 1 post conception to have the same moral value as a baby at day 1 postnatal. So while I sincerely hope that Roe v Wade is overturned and the legal question of when life begins is returned to legislatures (either at the state or federal level), I am skeptical that any such change would lead to a precipitous drop in the number of abortions. And as the OP correctly points out, that number is what it really comes down to in the end, and it is atrociously high.
In other words, the battle to reduce the number of abortions will always be fought at the level of the hearts and minds of individuals and not in the statehouses or courthouses. And that battle will likely prove much more difficult than the legal/legislative one.
FST, I use Black because I don’t think every one of the darker pigmented persons residing in the U.S. has African ancestry. They may not even be American.
Margaret Sanger started Planned Parenthood with the explicit purpose of keeping down the population of undesirable minorities.
Indeed. And I remember that legal abortion was supposed to eliminate such horrors as girls giving birth in toilets, newborns found in trash cans, and illegitimacy. It failed to prevent these things and no one remarked on it at all.
This post was a concise reminder of the grim reality we face in our nation today. It boggles the mind that this horrific practice is still going on, it’s barbaric and evil. God will not hold this nation blameless, I fear what price we may pay one day.
My sentiments too. The Holocaust x 10. It’s staggering and there should be outrage at this but instead it’s pursued as a right.
Wait a minute . . . I thought The Pill was supposed to fix this . . .
As Rush says, abortion is the left’s sacrament – not illegal aliens, not blacks, not Hispanics, not world peace, not the climate, not gun control . . .
Why is being alive better than being dead? Death seems alot less painful than life.
We all have the right, or at least the ability, to choose death for ourselves: we don’t have the right to choose it for innocent people.
You’re kidding right..?
But it’s a helluva lot less fun . . .