Honorable Mention: Eleni Arakas
St. Andrew Catholic School
Life without Exception
When does life begin? When does life end? People ask questions like this quite often. There is one answer. Some may disagree with the answer, some may not. Life starts when a being is conceived. Life ends when a being passes away. From there, the being is hopefully sent up to heaven with all the angels and saints. This is considered the afterlife. God teaches us that all human life is important. Let me ask. Did God ever say how small or big the source of life had to be? No. Did God ever say that life out of the womb is more valuable than it is in the womb? No. Does God love everyone the same, no matter how small or big, how strong or weak, how sick or healthy? Yes. For example, there is a sick and homeless person on the street, and there is a wealthy and healthy person in a house. Whom does God love more? Neither! There is a small child who still depends on his mother, and there is an adult who does not need his parents anymore. Whom does God love more? Neither; He loves us all the same. There is an adult with the mentality of a child. Does God view children differently than He does adults? No, because we are all children of God. Another thought: If there is a small child who still depends on his mother, is he any different than a child in the womb who still depends on its mother? Is a child conceived out of wedlock any less of a child of God? Of course not.
This also goes along with respecting people of all ages, throughout all stages of life. According to the New York Times, a Dutch law is being considered that would allow euthanasia for healthy elderly Dutch citizens. They call it “mercy killing.” This is insanity. A doctor does not get to decide when a person does or does not die! That is all God’s decision. Life is so much more than getting murdered before birth or even at old age. Why should this be a doctor’s choice? Why should a doctor get to decide when and how a person dies? Death is something that is all in God’s hands. Not a doctor or a mother’s hands, but in God’s hands. In God’s eyes, we are all equal. All means all ages, both genders, all races, and all religions. This does not mean we get to kill people because a nation might have an issue with overpopulation.
Now let us focus on a very important subject: abortion. This is awful. People think that they can just kill someone—a human being. No one knows what that person, if spared from this terrible act, might do in this world! What happens if a woman conceived a baby with Down syndrome? Should the mother kill that baby just because he or she will be different? No. Why? That precious human is a perfect example of heaven on earth. Alveda King, Martin Luther King Jr.’s niece once said, “How can the ‘Dream’ survive if we murder the children? Every aborted baby is like a slave in the womb of his or her mother. The mother decides his or her fate.” Why would a mother kill her child? That child did nothing wrong. Mother Teresa reminds us, “If we accept that a mother can kill even her own child, how can we tell other people not to kill one another? . . . Any country that accepts abortion is not teaching its people to love, but to use any violence to get what they want. This is why the greatest destroyer of love and peace is abortion.”
God always says we should love each other as ourselves. If women abort their babies, do they love them as they love themselves? Of course not. A woman wouldn’t kill herself because she didn’t want herself. That makes no sense. There are so many better choices—adoption and foster care, to name two. In Asia, there are 35.5 million abortions per year. In Africa, there are 8.2 million abortions per year. In Australia, there are about 75,000 abortions per year. In Latin America, there are 4.2 million abortions per year. In our own North America, there are 1.2 million abortions per year. We must do better.
Finally, let’s talk about some of the methods of abortion. In a vacuum aspiration, the baby is sucked out of the womb with a vacuum and torn into pieces. This is sickening. With the second method, dilation and suction curettage, the baby is fatally sucked out and a looped knife is used to dice up the placenta before the pieces are removed. In the third, induction, labor is induced in the second or third trimester. From there, saline is used to kill the baby in the womb. One other kind of abortion is the abortion pill. With this method, the baby dies when Mifeprex blocks the production of progesterone. From all of this above, a person could likely agree this is horrible. There is no way on Earth, Mars, Jupiter, or even Saturn that this should be allowed to happen to anyone.
“Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I dedicated you, a prophet to the nations I appointed you” (Jeremiah 1:5). How do we fix this? How can we do better? How can we spread peace throughout all the world? It isn’t hard. Want to know the answer? It’s love. It does not matter how old one is. Everyone can love. “Love one another. As I have loved you, so you also should love one another,” John 13:34.
Sources Cited
Bilfesky, Dan, and Christopher F. Schuetze. “Dutch Law Would Allow Assisted Suicide for Healthy Older People.” The New York Times, Oct. 13, 2016, nytimes.com.
Endangered: A World in Peril. Human Life Alliance, 2017.