Monday, August 29, 2011

Why is abortion still legal?

By Priscilla Lundquist

During a promotional event at the pregnancy care center where I was interning, a foreign exchange student came into the office asking what our purpose was on campus. When I told him that we were reaching out to women facing unplanned pregnancies who are at risk of aborting their babies, he was astonished that abortion was legal in the United States.

As I look back over the years since the Supreme Court's decision in Roe v. Wade I also am shocked and astonished. My heart breaks that abortion is still legal in the United States. All of the efforts made by lawmakers and pro-life organizations and all of the advancements in science and technology proving that the unborn is human have not kept millions of babies from being killed. (Although many lives have been saved by our efforts.)

How can a country that extols freedom and justice sacrifice millions and millions of its children in the name of women's rights?

Even at the time of Roe v. Wade, with its comparatively outdated science and technology, early ultrasound technology and prenatal science demonstrated the unborn as alive and as such, deserving of protection from being aborted. Many states backed this evidence up with laws that prohibited abortion. Despite this, the members of the Supreme Court declared that the unborn were not persons protected under the Fourteenth Amendment. They passed over growing scientific evidence in favor of the unborn deserving protection and delivered a decision that has resulted in the slaughter of countless human lives.

Progress in science and technology has only made their error more obvious.

One of the goals of most pregnancy care centers is to persuade those women who have positive pregnancy tests to come back in for ultrasounds. Over 90 percent of those who see the ultrasounds of their babies choose life. Advancing ultrasound technology shows clearly that it is just as much a human life inside the womb as outside of it. When an expecting mother looks at the screen, they see not an indistinct mass of tissue, but an intricately formed, beautiful baby. It becomes clear that abortion is not a decision to simply "terminate" the pregnancy but rather a decision to end a life.

Science has also helped our cause, showing just how early an unborn baby's heart starts beating, bones and features develop, and brain waves are detectable. "Prior to the earliest abortions, the unborn already has every body part she will ever have," Randy Alcorn writes in his book ProLife Answers to ProChoice Arguments.

How long will our nation ignore the mounting pile of evidence of the unborn's right to life and continue to sanction and fund this shocking practice?