As the election draws nearer, we need to continue to remind our friends and family that abortion must remain at the forefront of their minds. Abortion has a terrible impact on society and on individuals that cannot be ignored.
Abortion’s Slippery Slope
Nat Hentoff writes of his conversion to the prolife movement, which occurred while he was reporting on the “Babies Doe” cases (in which the parents of newborn babies with spina bifida and Down’s Syndrome were seeking the right to kill their children by starvation and dehydration) when he heard this procedure referred to as a “late abortion.” He began to see the connection between caring for the born and caring for the unborn. He says,
for the first time, I began to pay attention to the “slippery slope” warnings of pro-lifers… Because abortion had become legal and easily available, that argument ran—as you well know—infanticide would eventually become openly permissible, to be followed by euthanasia for infirm, expensive senior citizens. And then… I saw…Australian bio-ethicist Peter Singer assert that the slope was not slippery at all, but rather a logical throughway once you got to it.
We can see how his vision has played out today—we are on the throughway now. The devaluing of the unborn child was only the beginning.
Abortion Has Led To Multiple Other Evils
Pharmacists are forced to prescribe contraceptives, regardless of their personal beliefs. The Conscience Clause for health care providers has been weakened, meaning they may be forced to participate in procedures they are morally opposed to. The Burris Amendment would undermine military doctors’ rights to refuse to participate in abortions.
During the debate on health care reform many wrote about (and many more worried about) the rationing of care that could accompany the changes. Now we find that money—not the best interests of a person—is governing coverage decisions by Medicare and the FDA, according to a recent article.
It is now legal in some states for a physician to “assist” the suicide of a patient with life-taking drugs. Euthanasia and assisted suicide were legalized in the Netherlands two decades ago, with devastating consequences on the respect for life. According to a 1990 study conducted in the Netherlands:
2,300 people died as the result of doctors killing them upon request (active, voluntary euthanasia).
400 people died as a result of doctors providing them with the means to kill themselves (physician-assisted suicide).
1,040 people (an average of 3 per day) died from involuntary euthanasia, meaning that doctors actively killed these patients without the patients’ knowledge or consent. …
In addition, 8,100 patients died as a result of doctors deliberately giving them overdoses of pain medication, not for the primary purpose of controlling pain, but to hasten the patient’s death. In 61% of these cases (4,941 patients), the intentional overdose was given without the patient’s consent.
According to the Remmelink Report, Dutch physicians deliberately and intentionally ended the lives of 11,840 people by lethal overdoses or injections—a figure which accounts for 9.1% of the annual overall death rate of 130,000 per year. The majority of all euthanasia deaths in Holland are involuntary deaths.
The number of involuntary deaths, imposed by “all-knowing doctors” is staggering and should terrify us.
Moreover, abortion on demand was supposed to create a world in which every child who is born is “wanted,” thus decreasing child abuse. In fact, child abuse has dramatically increased since the legalization of abortion in America. Post-abortion researchers David Reardon and Theresa Burke have found that many post-abortive women are more prone to violence against children because of the way they have been scarred by their abortions.
We have also found that in-vitro fertilization, stem cell research, cloning, and other similar medical “advances” have a tendency to devalue life. As individuals find themselves in positions where they determine who deserves to live (which embryos are the healthiest or of the right sex), they make themselves in the image of God. Life is no longer valuable in and of itself; it is valuable based on its quality and what it can give to us.
This outlook carries over to other areas of life—we determine what is right based on what is good for us at the moment. This means people define sex, marriage, and death based on what is convenient for them, rather than what is true and right. They build their lives on sand, rather than solid rock. This is not good for them or for society.
Abortion was merely the beginning of many destructive practices in our society today. Supporting a “right to abortion” means supporting that which encourages the denial of conscience protections, euthanasia, child abuse, and so much more. Vote pro-life to reject these practices which devalue all human life.
