What are the unborn?
That is the central question to the debate over abortion. Prolife people recognize the unborn as human beings who deserve to be protected by law while those who favor legal abortion often argue the unborn are something less than human. Those in the mushy middle of the abortion debate often seesaw between being uncomfortable with abortion and being uncomfortable with strong restrictions on abortion. Many members of our society often have a split personality when it comes to how the unborn should be treated and our society’s laws often reflect this way of thinking.
Michigan and many other states around the country recognize the killing of an unborn child as murder, as long as the child is “wanted” and the person killing the child isn’t an abortionist. When someone besides an abortionist, like an angry boyfriend, kills or attempts to kill a child in the womb, they face the full force of the law. There are numerous examples of this phenomenon in the span of less than a week.
In late April 2011, Dominic Holt-Reid pleads guilty to attempted murder in Ohio after he tried to force his girlfriend to get an abortion at gunpoint. He faces up to 10 years in jail for trying to kill his child while still in the womb.
In California, a woman was charged with murder after an altercation led to the death of her aunt’s unborn child. Nieshia Johnson allegedly kneed her pregnant aunt in the stomach several times. Her aunt later miscarried and the cause of the child’s death was “determined to be premature delivery of the fetus, due to blunt force trauma.”
In Minnesota, a truck driver has been charged with three counts of vehicular manslaughter for killing two women and an unborn child when he drove full speed into a traffic jam because he was allegedly reaching down to grab something to drink.
In all of these cases, the unborn child is treated just like any other human being. Yet if these same children were killed by an abortionist, no charges could even be considered because seven Supreme Court justices ruled in favor of legal abortion in Roe v. Wade and overturned abortion laws and regulations in all 50 states.
While the science of embryology confirms unborn children are living human beings, our schizophrenic laws treat some of them as valuable human beings worthy of legal protection and some of them as biological waste, all depending on who does the killing. Sadly, many people are comfortable with this situation.
As prolifers we need to stress the inherent value of each and every unborn child. Value doesn’t vary based on how a child is killed, who does the killing or if the child is wanted by her parents or not.
Be a voice for the vulnerable. For more educational resources on abortion and other prolife issues, visit Right to Life of Michigan at www.rtl.org.
