RE: The annual March for Life is a misnomer, May 25-June 28
For over 300 years, the Atlantic Slave Trade saw the cruel mistreatment and forced labour of millions of Africans who were considered an inferior species. From 1939 to 1945, the world saw the murder of six million Jews whom Hitler saw unworthy to live. In 1994, Rwanda witnessed the slaughter of 800,000 Tutsi whom the Hutu ethnic majority deemed as “cockroaches” that needed extermination. Between 2010 and 2014, an average of 56 million unborn babies worldwide have been aborted annually, according to an article from the National Post.
The March for Life simply begs the question: who is a person?
We don’t have to look far to see the human race has not yet crawled out of the pit of discrimination and injustice. Despite our advocacy for freedom and equality, some seem to be excluded in our mission towards a universal reality of equally valued persons. The unwanted unborn child is amid the lowest. And I fear that only few see the dire need to fight for their right to live.
And that is what the March for Life is about.
I have participated for three years and can say the pro-choice side continually fails to see the countless number of MPs, organizations, teachers, scholars and doctors who spend the day giving strong testimony to the humanity of the unborn child and compassion for the mother. And what was largely unacknowledged in last issue’s letter on the March for Life were the women sharing their personal experience with abortion, the regret they suffered, and the forgiveness they later encountered.
This is not a question of women’s rights, but of human rights. If it is a matter of life and death, then it transcends individual belief and personal autonomy. Mere opinion, ignorant rants, and throwing condoms at our faces (true story) will not satisfy.
The single-celled human embryo doesn’t become a different thing in the stages of development, but simply divides, grows. At 12 weeks, most organs are formed and functioning. According to Keith L. Moore, a University of Toronto professor of anatomy, “this cell [zygote] results from the union of an oocyte and a sperm . . . the beginning of a new human being [embryo].” With a living, beating human heart.
Abortion utterly ends that life. In the 1984 educational film The Silent Scream, Dr. Bernard Nathanson describes the procedure as “a child being torn apart, dismembered, disarticulated, crushed, and destroyed by the unfeeling steel instruments of the abortionist.” The child is helpless, their scream ignored, their light snuffed out. A human being has been killed.
The contradictions are astoundingly horrific. The wanted child is regarded as a patient, the unwanted as non-human. We praise the abortionist yet mourn the miscarriage.
Yet the solution cannot disregard the corruption of systems or understate the delicacy of situations. The foster-care system must be reformed and women exceedingly loved. It is a fight to protect both at all cost, the powerful and the vulnerable, the wanted and the unwanted, the widow and the orphan, the mother and the child. Both are astronomically precious.
And if you are alone and confused, seek help and counsel; you deserve to be cared for. If you had an abortion, there is marvelous grace and redemption. If you are in-between, be earnest in your research. If you are pro-choice, please reconsider.
So is a fetus a person? A human being? An image-bearer of God? I say yes.
