The devaluing of human life

By Aussiegirl

Nat Hentoff, a principled liberal, talks about the culture of death and the value of human life. Out of the mouths of babes -- an abortion doctor tries to explain to her 9 year old son what she does for a living.

Think about it. It's a human being. What person could deny this when the first pictures anyone sees anymore of a prospective family member are those in-utero ultrasounds that show babies from the earliest stages of gestation. What woman could kill that in all conscience, no matter how difficult the circumstances?

I know that many women have had abortions who now bitterly regret them. In many ways making abortions so easy to obtain has been a disservice that doesn't allow enough time for considering other options. How many women I know who feel regret and guilt over having made a hasty decision years ago to have an abortion when an inconvenient pregnancy suddenly intruded. Think twice, and three times, and yet a fourth ladies. And many of us might consider that given the circumstances under which our own parents had us whether or not they might have aborted us had the opportunity been available. Can all of us say that our lives have not been worth living because our parents were in less than perfect circumstances when we were born?

I was born in a Displaced Persons camp in post-war Germany. How inconvenient that must have been - how difficult. My older sister was born in Soviet Ukraine a few years before the war broke out. My mother was only 19 years old and an impoverished teacher of Russian and Ukrainian literature as was my father. Between them they had virtually nothing. Had she had the opportunity I'm sure she might have considered a termination. But for all the hardship I doubt she ever regretted giving birth. My own niece just gave birth to a little boy, and we've been seeing the sonograms all along -- the first one at only a few months. Yesterday we saw his first photo ex-utero -- and he's still the same beautiful child we watched develop in the womb.

Life -- it's a beautiful choice -- life is always valuable. It's not about privacy. It's not about choice. It's still killing a baby, no matter how you choose to ignore the uncomfortable truth.

The devaluing of human life -The Washington Times

A friend of mine told me of a recent conversation at his family's dinner table that keeps reverberating in my mind. His wife, a physician, also performs abortions. And their 9-year-old son -- hearing the words and curious about its meaning -- looked up from his plate and asked, "What is an abortion?" His mother tried carefully to describe it in simple terms.

"But," said her son, "that means killing the baby." The mother then explained that there are certain months during which an abortion cannot be performed, with very few exceptions. The 9-year-old shook his head. "But," he said, "it doesn't matter what month. It still means killing the babies." Hearing the story, I wished it could be repeated to the justices of the Supreme Court, in the hope that at least five of them might act on this 9-year-old's clarity of thought and vision.

The boy's spontaneous insistence on the primacy of life also reminded me of a powerful pro-life speaker and writer who, many years ago, helped me become a pro-lifer. He was a preacher, a black preacher. He said: "There are those who argue that the right to privacy is of a higher order than the right to life.

"That," he continued, "was the premise of slavery. You could not protest the existence or treatment of slaves on the plantation because that was private and therefore out of your right to be concerned." This passionate reverend used to warn: "Don't let the pro-choicers convince you that a fetus isn't a human being. That's how the whites dehumanized us... The first step was to distort the image of us as human beings in order to justify what they wanted to do and not even feel they'd done anything wrong."

That preacher was the Rev. Jesse Jackson. Later, he decided to run for the presidency, and it was a credible campaign that many found inspiring in its focus on what still had to be done on civil rights. But Mr. Jackson had by now become "pro-choice," much to the appreciation of most of those in the liberal base.