By Anthony Daub
Anyone who is familiar with the fight for life has heard the argument “My body, my choice,” and it can be a very difficult argument to counter. The issue seems pretty black and white. After all, your body does belong to you, right? This is a particularly powerful argument for young people, especially young college students who are desperate to gain control over some aspect of their lives. What makes it even harder to counter this argument is that our society is very individualistic, where some things belong to you and you alone. Combine that attitude with a desire to express independence and suddenly college students make way more sense. As a student myself, I would know. But right now, my hope is to show you why this argument is invalid; it is in fact your body (kind of), but do you really understand the gravity of your choices?
So let’s begin. Is it really your body? The obvious answer is, “Well, duh,” but the actual answer is a bit more complex than that. If you are religious in any way the answer is much easier. It doesn’t matter if you’re Christian, Muslim, Jewish, or some other religion; if you believe in a higher power then by necessity you believe you were created by God.
Now I don’t know about you, but when I create something, I normally believe it belongs to me. The same is true of God. In His case, since He created you, you belong to Him. Your body is a gift for God and one day He will hold you accountable for how you used it. If you are not religious, the answer is a bit different for you. Think of society as a giant computer and yourself as a tiny piece of code that helps the computer run. By yourself, you cannot cause the computer to function. You require the assistance of all the other sequences of code to make the computer do its job. But if you are suddenly removed from the larger code, the computer ceases to function properly. The computer needs you, and in particular it needs you to do your job in order for it to work. Society is the same way. Every action you take and every decision you make impacts the entirety of society on some level. This means that if you make a bad decision, all of society will suffer to some extent. Thus, when you make a decision—like what to do with “your” body—keep in mind that nothing is truly private and everything has consequences. It’s an uncomfortable realization, but every single person in the world is connected to every other person. So can anyone truly say his body and actions affect him alone? The answer is no.
“But what does this have to do with me making my own choices?” you may be asking. One consistent theme across most of my writing is that for every action there is a consequence. Anyone who is a nerd like I am realizes that this is one of the foundational principles in science which we call Newton’s Third Law: “For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.” What this means for you is that your actions make a permanent mark in history and affect the future in ways you cannot possibly predict. What seems like a relatively minor decision in your life today could have major consequences for people a hundred years from now. It sounds crazy, but hear me out. Let’s say you decide that you are going to use contraceptives so you don’t have to worry about getting pregnant or impregnating someone. Setting aside the fact that many contraceptives actively kill your preborn child, what is the consequence of this action? To you it may simply mean that you won’t be a parent anytime soon. To the potential child who would have been a natural result of your actions, it means he never has the chance to be created. Again, this may not seem like a big deal to you, but the truth is that each one of us has something we are meant to do in life. Perhaps that child was meant to end poverty or disease but will never have the chance. We will never know the answer. The same is true of women who have abortions. For them, it is no longer a case of preventing pregnancy, but an act of denying another person the right to fulfill his destiny. That little girl being aborted had the potential to change the very fabric of society. Now she will never get that chance because she’s dead.
Remember earlier when I compared society to a computer? If you are a tiny piece of code and your function in the program is to replicate and create more code to sustain the system, what happens when you begin terminating the code you’ve replicated? The system fails. This is what we would consider a computer virus—an ailment that eventually destroys the system unless it is vigorously erased from the code. Shifting back to reality, you can clearly see where I’m going with this. Abortion is the virus affecting society and causing the “system” to fail. When our society eradicates its tiniest members, it can no longer function properly.
You say it’s your choice, yet when it impacts the entire society in which we live, should it really be your choice? You have been granted unimaginable power to write the future through your choices. Do the future a favor and don’t remove someone from the timeline just to make your own life easier. You never know who that tiny person was meant to be or what he was meant to do. Give life a chance; you won’t regret it.
Anthony Daub is a marketing consultant for American Life League and Life Defenders. For more information on Life Defenders, ALL’s amazing new youth program, visit lifedefender.org.