Right to Abortion?

This is a great post by Ric Schnekenburger. I couldn’t have said it better so will repost it here!

Modern technology has given us the awesome ability to gaze into the womb and spy on growing unborn children. We can see them suck their thumbs and smile, cry and kick. We can count every delicate rib and make sure their developing hearts have all four chambers. We can count the toes of tiny feet that are not yet one inch long.

The blessings of ultrasound and modern 3-D imaging have enabled us to see that human embryos are miniature human beings just months away from life in the outside world. They have enabled doctors to see potential birth defects and problems in advance, and have given parents the chance to have surgeons operate on their unborn children before the tots have even blinked in the light of day.

January 22 will mark the 38th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, and prayer vigils and march events are planned to commemorate the 1973 US Supreme Court decision. Those 38 years represent 58 million abortions, 58 million faces gone from our classrooms and streets, our businesses and our homes.

According to a recent Guttmacher Institute report, the abortion rate dropped each year in America for 15 years straight from 1990 to 2005, after which it has basically leveled out. The US abortion rate in 1981 was its highest at 29.3 abortions per 1000 women, and was 27.4 per 1000 women in 1990, the year that marked the highest number of abortions at 1.609 million. By 2005 the abortion rate had reached a low of 19.4 abortions per 1000 women. Since then, however, it has waffled just a little. It rose to 19.9 in 2006, dropped to 19.5 in 2007 and rose a little to 19.6 in 2008. There were 1.206 million abortions in 2005 and 1.212 million in 2008.

The numbers vary greatly between the states, however. Wyoming had the lowest abortion rate in 2008 with less than one abortion per 1000 women, and Washington DC's abortion rate decreased from 54 to 30 per 1000 between 2005 and 2008, leaving Delaware with the highest abortion rate at 40 per 1000.

On January 24, the annual March for Life rally will begin at the National Mall and 4th Street in Washington DC and will proceed down Constitution until the march ends at the US Supreme Court. At least four of the Supreme Court justices are believed to be willing to overturn Roe v. Wade if it came up.

For his part, Justice Antonin Scalia has blatantly called Roe v. Wade is a constitutional "absurdity."

"You want a right to abortion? There’s nothing in the Constitution about that. But that doesn’t mean you cannot prohibit it," he said in an interview with California Lawyer. "If people wanted abortion to be legal, they didn't have to find a non-existent right to it in the Constitution," he said.

"If indeed the current society has come to different views, that’s fine. You do not need the Constitution to reflect the wishes of the current society," he said. "If the current society wants to outlaw discrimination by sex, hey, we have things called legislatures, and they enact things called laws. You don’t need a constitution to keep things up-to-date. All you need is a legislature and a ballot box."

Heart Matters:
While abortion numbers are still high in many parts of the country, crisis pregnancy centers outnumber abortion clinics three-fold in America. After 38 years, America has grown to realize that "choice" can cause grief and heartbreak that few women in 1973 truly understood.

Mothers are known for their protective instinct. Woe to the person who hurts their kids. It's a painful decision for the vast majority of women who choose abortion, going against all the nurturing, mothering nature in a woman's heart. Telling women they have a right to abortion is rather like telling them they have a right to saw off their legs. Most would rather not have to make that choice, and the more we can find ways to support and care for scared, agonizing pregnant women, the better they and their children will be in the end.

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