The Abortion Legacy

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The Abortion Legacy

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41 years later, this debate rages on.

I distinctly remember the day. It was a sunny Saturday and my whole family was piled in the car and we were on our way to church services. I was 12 and the conversation my parents were having was not making sense to me. My dad especially was very agitated as he talked about the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision making abortions legal for any reason.

The justification the Court gave was (as it came to be summarized) that a woman had the right to choose to keep or terminate a pregnancy since it was her body. Specifically, the Court ruled that “a pregnant woman is entitled to have an abortion until the end of the first trimester of pregnancy without any interference by the state.” The abortion debate here in the U.S.A. has raged unabated in the 41 years since.

Some History

Let’s review some history of this landmark ruling. The case the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on January 22, 1973 was Roe v. Wade, in which the Supreme Court struck down a Texas statute that made abortion illegal except where the life of the mother was in danger. The way the court system works in the United States is that when the Supreme Court rules on a case it overrides any local or state laws.

The “Roe” is the case was a woman named Norma McCorvey who filed the appeal in federal district court under the name of Jane Roe to maintain her anonymity. She filed the appeal because she was 23, divorced once already, unmarried, pregnant for the fourth time, out of work and was seeking an abortion (which was still illegal at the time in the state of Texas).

In filing the brief, she asked the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn the Texas abortion law on the grounds that to prevent her from having an abortion the law violated her constitutional right to privacy. The Court agreed with her but not without its own controversy. The ruling came too late for McCorvey to have a legal abortion so she gave her daughter up for adoption, as she had done with her previous children.

Norma McCorvey maintained her anonymity for years after the Court ruling (and never participated in the original case except to file the brief), but in 1989 she allied herself directly with the abortion rights movement. She became the face of the abortion rights movement – both for those who wished to have, and for those who hated this procedure. In August of 1995 McCorvey publicly repudiated her stance on abortion and allied herself with the pro-life movement in this debate, but the floodgates had too long been open.

What is the legacy of legalized abortion?

Here in the U.S., since 1973 until 2008 (the last reliable numbers available), there have been approximately 820 million legal abortions performed. To put this in context, the current population of the U.S. is about 318 million – which means that more than two and a half times the current U.S. population has been killed before they had a chance to draw a breath.

Most of the legal abortions in this country are from unwed mothers – about 85%. Of that number more than 55% are from women who have never had an abortion before, 36% are from women who have had at least one abortion previously and 8% were from women who had had three or more prior abortions (statistics from the Centers for Disease Control).

Only a very small fraction of these abortions are done because of rape, a health risk to the mother or other health reasons – which mean the overwhelming majority of abortions are performed as a form of birth control.

As a vertical thinker, you must consider this topic differently than the currently accepted view. Abortion is murder which Exodus 20:13 prohibits: “You shall not murder.”

No pregnancy should be seen as an inconvenience or that new life is just a mass of cells with no life. Left uninterrupted, a pregnancy ends in a new life and life is precious to God. God designed the family, and the proper order is marriage and then children as they can be provided for in that context.

The legacy of legalized abortion is not one of life. It is a legacy of lost lives and broken relationships. If you have had an abortion, repentance can be sought just the same as any other sin. But abortion is a permanent solution to a temporary “problem,” and one many women regret for the rest of their lives. If you find yourself in a situation where you are contemplating abortion, please seek counseling to understand your options that do not violate God’s Word.

The United Church of God, the parent organization of Vertical Thought, has published a great deal on this topic. Here are some links to other articles on this subject for further reading:

- Teen Bible Study Guide: Abortion

- Is Abortion the Answer to Unwanted Pregnancy?

- The Abortion Controversy

- The Abortion Debate: What Does God Say?

- What does the Bible teach about abortion?

- Abortion and God’s Purpose for Human Life?

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Comments

  • Eric V. Snow
    It's sad to think how common abortion is in America. About 43% of all American women during their lifetimes will undergo this surgery. About 2% of all women between 15 and 44 will get an abortion each year. Since so many women get abortions, it's a major controversy in our society. In order to reach people on the other side of this debate, it's best to try to use arguments based on human reason that undermine the moral certainty of proponents of "reproductive rights." (Nowadays they have a hard time in political debates even using the eumphemistic term "abortion.") For example, in the developing human embryo, the heart begins to beat 18-24 days after conception, and its brain waves can be detected 40-43 days later. If the signs of death occur when the heart beat and brain waves stop, at the barest mininum one logically has to admit that this would be when life begins. (In actuality, life begins at conception). One anti-abortion doctor applied this knowledge: He successfully discouraged many abortions by letting women hear their baby's heart beats through his stethoscope before they made a final decision to get an abortion. Furthermore, a fetus is able to feel pain. At eight weeks old, it drinks fluid from the embryotic sack. When it's sweet, it drinks more, and when it's better, it drinks less. When a needle is inserted near it, it moves away. A developing embryo isn't really "part of the woman's body," such as an arm or leg. It has different DNA from its mother, and from the day of conception is intrinsically destined to become separate life from the mother. Let's apply the logic of the law of cause and effect to analyzing abortion. What a thing does is based on what it is. For example, an acorn will become an oak tree, not an elephant or a tulip, because of the genetic information built into it. Likewise, the fertilized egg in a woman's body inevitably will become a baby nine months later unless someone stops it or a natural miscarriage occurs. Think about what is implied when late-term babies live after botched abortions. At the barest mininum, shouldn't all thinking people agree that abortions are immoral after the point of viability is reached? But when, how it is "murder" to kill a baby at 34 weeks, but not at 20 weeks? For these kinds of reasons, abortion is clearly murder even when using human reason alone.
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