A Pro-Life Perspective on the Abortion Issue

By Clarke Sanders – Program Director at Salina Media Group
and a former candidate for the Kansas State Senate

When considering abortion, it isn’t enough to say that the central question of the debate is: “When does life begin?” That is not the central question, it is – in fact – the only question. I say this because clearly if it can be shown that life begins at conception then protecting that innocent life becomes of paramount concern trumped only in those rare, rare cases when the pregnancy is a clear and present threat to the physical life of the mother. If, on the other hand, life begins at some point other than conception – what happens during the pregnancy is only a matter for the woman involved and those she chooses to trust to be concerned about it.

The simple, incontrovertible truth is this: LIFE BEGINS AT CONCEPTION.

Those who argue in favor of “choice” rarely, if ever, want to talk about this. Why? They know they can’t deny this fact and here’s why:

At the moment of conception you have a new life. At the moment of conception you have an organism, indeed a baby, with a unique genetic code. The developing baby’s DNA has never existed before and will never exist again. At the moment of conception you begin to have growth through cell division. That single cell divides into two cells, two becomes four, four, eight and so on.

And then what happens?:
• In less than 10 days, the new individual burrows into the wall of his or her mother’s womb.
• By 20 days the heart, brain, spinal cord, eyes and nervous system have all started to develop.
• By the 24th day the baby’s heart starts to beat.
• Within 28 days the arms and legs are budding.
• At 30 days the baby is already 10,000 times bigger than she or he was at conception and blood is flowing in her or his veins – blood that has a different genetic makeup from mom’s blood.
• At 35 days, you can see the mouth, ears and nose taking shape.
• At 42 days – just six short weeks after conception – the baby’s skeleton is formed.
• By the 56th day, this new life is clearly recognizable as a human baby.
• Before day 60 the baby will have his or her own set of fingerprints – a set of prints so unique that nobody who has come before has ever matched it and nobody yet to come ever will.
• And, just for the record, by the 63rd day the baby has fingernails. This fact was instrumental in the fictional movie character Juno’s decision to walk out of an abortion clinic where she was waiting to have an abortion.

To suggest that life begins at some point other than conception is simply arbitrary. What opponents of the pro-life movement are challenged to do is offer proof beyond the shadow of any doubt that life does NOT begin at conception. The reasonable doubt standard in this case is not good enough. If there is any question, any question whatsoever, as to whether or not life begins at conception, you must err on the side of life. A civilized and just society demands nothing less.

Given all this, how is it even possible that the Supreme Court in 1973 decided to legalize all abortions in the infamous Roe vs Wade case along with the companion Doe vs Bolton case?

First of all, the Supreme Court Justices in 1973 could not look at a sonogram or consider any of the modern technologies we have today that can measure the developing baby while she or he is still in the womb. In 1973 the genetic code had not been cracked. Now that it has, this fact alone should be enough for the Court to reconsider legalized abortion. Justice Harry Blackmun who wrote the majority opinion in the Roe decision said that the Court wasn’t even interested in tackling the question of when life begins because the development of man’s knowledge wasn’t sufficient enough for the Court to even make a guess at the answer to that question. Given what has been learned since 1973, I would suggest that we now do, in fact, have enough knowledge to reasonably tackle the question of when life begins.

It is also important to note that the Court was not told the truth in the Roe case. One small example of this comes from Norma Jean McCorvey herself (she was the “Jane Roe” in the case) who was never informed by her lawyers that their goal was to outlaw bans on abortion all over the country. They never told her she was being used as a pawn in a much bigger game than her unfortunate circumstance. 22 years after the Roe decision, Norma Jean McCorvey joined the pro-life movement and now fights to overturn the decision that bears her pseudonym.

Regardless of one’s position on abortion, there are a couple of things that can not be denied.

First, the Constitution says nothing about abortion. Abortion was probably as far from the framers’ minds as anything could be.

Secondly, the Constitution does not have the word “privacy” in it. There is no “right to privacy” regarding abortion or any topic granted by the Constitution. Justice Blackmun acknowledged this in his majority opinion and Justice Rehnquist went even further in his dissenting opinion in the Roe vs Wade case. Justice Rehnquist indicated that the Court was basically finding a right to privacy in the 14th Amendment that the authors themselves did not even know existed.

Given this, the decision about whether abortion should or should not be legal must be left to each of our 50 states to decide.

Obviously, social conservatives have clearly been disappointed with the Roe decision over the years, but they are not alone. Such leading liberal thinkers in this country as William Saletan – a self-described liberal Republican and chief national correspondent at Slate.com, Yale Law Journal, Professor John Hart Ely, Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, legal affairs editor Jeffrey Rosen, commentator Michael Kinsley, legal analyst Benjamin Wittes and law professors Alan Dershowitz, Cass Sunstein and Kermit Roosevelt all have huge problems with the Roe v Wade decision for a variety of reasons. However, perhaps nobody has stated it better than Edward Lazarus. Quoting Lazarus from the online encyclopedia, Wikipedia, which tell us that Lazarus is “a former Blackmun clerk who “loved Roe’s author like a grandfather” wrote: “As a matter of constitutional interpretation and judicial method, Roe borders on the indefensible…Justice Blackmun’s opinion provides essentially no reasoning in support of its holding. And in the almost 30 years since Roe’s announcement, no one has produced a convincing defense of Roe on its own terms.“

The murder of George Tiller was a sad thing. Given that it happened in a church makes it all the more tragic. It is certainly not something the pro-life community wanted to see happen. What those of us who are pro-lifers had hoped and prayed for was for George to have a change of heart and to voluntarily stop doing abortions. Failing that, we wanted the law to step in and stop him. Now, neither of those outcomes is possible. As far as we know, the accused killer was not affiliated with any pro-life group. To try and say that this misguided individual in some way represents main stream thought in the pro-life community is simply wrong. As this person has not testified in court at this point (and may never testify) who can say what was going on in his head?

Here’s another sad thing. If the League of Women Voters has not seriously and completely revisited the abortion question since 1983, it is both sad and irresponsible given the advances in medical science in the last 25 plus years.

If the line you draw is at birth rather than conception, you are in the unenviable position of defending an abortion procedure called fully intact D & E, but more commonly known as “partial birth abortion”. Most people find barbaric the thought of removing up to 90% of the unborn from the mother, jamming a scissor like instrument into the base of the skull to create a hole and inserting a tube used for suctioning out the brains, crushing the skull and then fully removing the dead body from the mother. However, if birth is the line you draw, this is something you must defend.

Would I ever consider changing my position on abortion? Yes. If somebody could come forward with credible evidence that life does NOT begin at conception and that women are not harmed by abortion, I would change my position in a heartbeat. If you are not pro-life, what would it take to convince you to change your mind?

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