What bothers me most about the abortion debate is not the issue itself but the people, on both sides of the debate, who are absolutely positive that everything they believe is right and all those who don't agree are completely wrong.,”Today is the 35th anniversary of the Roe v. Wade courtroom decision that legalized abortion in America and changed ethics and religious debates forever.
What bothers me most about the abortion debate is not the issue itself but the people, on both sides of the debate, who are absolutely positive that everything they believe is right and all those who don't agree are completely wrong.
The truth is there are many misconceptions about and gray areas within the abortion debate, and the determining factor for where you stand on the abortion issue is when you believe life begins.
If you're pro-life you believe human life is pre-established and is dependent on the biology of conception, that God has pre-established every life and knows every human being before they are even born.
If you're pro-choice you believe the ability to think, reason, love and feel are intrinsic parts of what defines the human person and so simple conception does not constitute a full-fledged human being.
In reality the entire debate comes down to what you define as human life and when you believe it begins, and there are quite a few tidbits of information that abortion extremists on either side often find it convenient to forget.
As Christians we believe that God is all-knowing, and thus God knows and loves all human beings even before we are born which is depicted in passages such as Jeremiah 1:5 "Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I set you apart."
There are many other similar passages in the Bible, but what pro-life extremists forget to mention is that the point of these passages is to show that God is omniscient—knowing everything about a person even before they are born, and not really having anything to do with the abortion debate or specifying whether or not the fetus is a full-fledged human being.
Also, a lot of the time these pro-life passages are taken completely out of context. The Jeremiah 1:5 passage, a popular pro-life passage continues, ".and I appointed you a prophet to the nations." Really, the purpose of the entire passage is to establish Jeremiah's authority as a prophet, and truthfully a lot of the pro-life Bible passages are taken out of context.
On the other hand, there is a lot the pro-choice extremists don't want you to know either.
For example, young and scared teenage girls or rape victims are the face of abortion in America but the 2007 national abortion statistics from the Center for Disease Control shows that few are rape victims and the average woman who undergoes an abortion is over the age of 25.
According to the newest abortion report by the CDC, roughly half of the 1.2 million women in America who underwent an abortion in 2007 were over the age of 25, only 17 percent were teenage girls, and more than 60 percent have already given birth to at least one child.
Additionally, abortion within Illinois has dropped 19 percent over the past five years and as a nation the abortion per-capita rate is the lowest its ever been since 1974.
The new CDC report shows abortions aren't just performed on rape victims or on young stupid girls who are scared for their future, but that most women who have an abortion are already mothers who simply don't want the hassle of having another child or going through the pregnancy.
Plus, if pro-choice advocates are wrong and full-fledged human life does begin at conception then America is guilty of more than 50 million legalized murders in the past 35 year&mdashlwhich is not really something that I'm ecstatic about.
Everyone has an abortion opinion, and I won't bore you with mine. I just want to point out a few things both sides conveniently forget.
Does life begin at conception or at birth?
It's amazing that artists have given us images like the Sistine Chapel, the humanities can give detailed information about cultures and societies from more than a millennium ago, and science can put a man on the moon but no one can identify when life actually starts.
It seems like a simple question doesn't it —is it alive or not?
I'd like to conclude with the thoughts of the comic Lewis Black.
Black has come up with a solution to the abortion issue, and it goes a little something like this: "We put all the people who 'know' when life begins into a room, and we say 'figure it out.' And if they can't figure out when life begins.we kill 'em."
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