On Choosing Life, Pt. III

This is part three of a series on abortion.  You can read Part I here and Part II here.

Late-Term/Partial Birth Abortions

While this is fairly uncommon, there are people who defend abortion up until the moment of natural birth.  Thus, it is worth mentioning.  At this late stage in pregnancy, killing the child inside of the womb (whether by saline injection or chopping it into tiny pieces) is impractical.  As such, late-term abortions usually require slightly different methods.  Right now, I refer to the "intact dilation and extraction" method. After artificially inducing labor, the baby is partially delivered, but not fully so as not to "technically" qualify as childbirth (thus, avoiding charges of infanticide).  The brain is them suctioned out of the base of the baby's skull, causing it to collapse and you have a freshly dead infant.  There are of course, other methods, but this one seems the most heinous.

However, even more important than the method used is the child being killed.  As I explained in the previous piece, abortion is not justified because each child is a human being and thus has intrinsic worth.  Often, this worth strikes people at this late stage, when the child is also now also physically recognizable as a human being.

It's hard to justify any medical procedure that requires the dismemberment or lobotomizing of developed children all in the name of "choice," "health" or "freedom," all things violently robbed from the dead child.

Medical Necessity Abortions

One might wonder why I would consider abortions performed out of medical necessity in this piece.  After all, there's no way I could oppose this sort of thing without being some sort of horrible person.  You would be right.  However, I also do not consider these procedures abortions, even if they technically fall under the definition.

It all boils down to intentions.  For what I consider abortion, the primary intention is the ending of a pregnancy, whether because of personal or economic reasons.  Health can be a concern, but is not the chief concern.

Medical abortions on the other hand, have a primary thrust of health, such as the pregnancy threatening the health of either mother or child or both.  Considering the child is being kept long enough to determine this, it suggests that the child is wanted.  Often, the news that the pregnancy needs to be ended brings extremely difficult decision-making, but not because the child is unwanted.  It is for this reason that I do not believe that medical reasons qualify as abortions, as these would happen with or without legally allowing them.

Rape and Incest Exceptions

(I'm just going to refer to this as the "rape exception" from here on.  I'm not really quite sure why incest gets tacked on.  Barring consensual relationships, incestuous sex is usually rape.)

With this topic, this piece enters some tricky ground.  I hear liberals constantly browbeat conservatives, claiming we have no heart when we do not believe in exceptions for rape.  Suddenly, we are all woman-hating Todd Akins who want the woman to suffer more from her rape by bearing the child it has created.

In the past, I used to be very unsure of where to stand on these grounds.  On the one hand, I believed that abortion was murder and, on the other, I most certainly did not want to hurt women who were violated in the most heinous of crimes.  However, I recently read an article that really cleared things up for me, planting me firmly on the side against "rape exceptions."

If abortion is killing innocent life, then the child is dying for the rapist's actions.  The child neither committed the rape nor asked to be conceived by a rapist.  In many ways, that child is a victim too, as that stigma will be attached to it, whether the child ever finds out or not.  Someone will know the child was conceived through a gross violation of something most people hold sacred.  However, in killing the child that results from rape, it punishes the child for the rapist's actions.  The child, in essence, receives punishment for that which is earned by and should be meted out to the rapist.

And when that child is allowed to live, maybe, just maybe, he or she may grow up to become greater than the legacy that created him or her.  Perhaps that child may one day grow up, not as a reminder of the crime inflicted on the victim, but as an example that even the greatest injustices can give rise to even greater hope.  That, I believe, is why the child should be allowed to live.

I will (hopefully) wrap up this series later this week, addressing various topics and concerns that have come up as I thought up the past three articles.