By Judie Brown
There appear to be an increasing number of people who cannot sort out the difference between respecting the right to life and respecting what is known as personal autonomy.
When our Founding Fathers wrote the Declaration of Independence, they could not possibly have known that the right to life endowed to each person by God would one day become a question of politics rather than a fundamental human right. Examples of the confusion that has been created by the public’s inability to comprehend basic truth is the root cause of this.
For example, Senator Tina Smith of Minnesota does not understand basic human embryology. If she did, she would not have commented on President Trump’s recent abortion remarks by saying that “we have to pay attention to this and make sure that we are doing everything that we can to protect people’s rights to make their own decisions about their own bodies and their own lives.”
To that, we respond: A decision to end the life of someone else should never be condoned, even when that other person is living and developing within the person contemplating such an act. This is why the act of abortion should be defined as a crime, even though people like Senator Tina Smith may not comprehend the simple truth.
To wit, a preborn person is a unique individual who happens to spend the first nine months of her life developing within her mother. She has her own identity, and even though she is within the body of her mother, she is unique in every way. Her identity commences with her existence, and yet in society today she is often viewed as nothing more than a problem. Examples of this twisted perspective are everywhere.
The state of Florida is set to vote on whether or not a right to abort a baby should be contained in the state constitution. Responding to this recent political maneuver, the Florida bishops issued a statement calling the proposal “extreme.” In the statement, they decry the proposal because it negates state measures that regulate abortion, as though abortion were a matter that could ever be controlled in some way.
Either every abortion is killing a person, or it is not. But somehow in the political malaise of today, even Catholic bishops seem confused.
The state of Arizona is confronting a similar quandary, which lawmakers have addressed. On the question of the state regulation of abortion, elected officials narrowly defeated an effort to eliminate abortion regulation, though the question of whether or not to protect the preborn during the first 15 weeks of their lives is now headed for the courts where a decision will eventually be made.
Again, the question is how long a baby would be protected, if at all, not whether or not every preborn person should be legally protected by law because he or she is a human being.
Politicians have a knack for ignoring the obvious, preferring to point fingers at each other as though abortion were a debate topic. Few seem to recognize the fact that abortion is an act of killing a human being.
Yet those of us who know better cannot help but wonder aloud: Why is it so difficult for apparently intelligent people to see that if their own mothers had confronted the diabolical arguments that they themselves are using and had subsequently chosen abortion, they would not exist?
Just as each of them has a right to life, so does every human being; our right to life comes from God alone.
