COLLISION COURSE: Abortion will abort itself

The cover story of the June 9 issue of Newsweek asks: "Should a fetus have rights?" It them goes on to note: "How science is changing the debate." The headlines are accompanied by a photo of an unborn child in the womb: inside the magazine are similar pictures.

Those might seem like remarkable words and images from a secular magazine until we recognize that more and more people and institutions are beginning to assent to the reality of human life in the womb and to follow that reality to its logical conclusion: the end of abortion.

It has not always been so. For the 30 years that abortion has been legal through all nine months of pregnancy, much of the media has recited the pro-abortion mantras by rote, even though doing so requires them to ignore science, deny that human life begins at conception, refuse to the hear the beating heart in the womb, and accept the myth of phrases like "mass of tissues" and "a woman's body."

Throughout those same decades, pro-life people have been warning that abortion is on an inevitable collision course with science. As the unborn child is photographed in utero, as surgeons operate on babies before birth and as DNA demonstrates how unique each of us is, it becomes more and more difficult to cling to the notion that there is nothing significant about the destruction of the human being before birth.

Public opinion is beginning to swing more and more away from abortion, and the law is following. One example is the movement to define the murder of unborn children like Conner Peterson as being as serious as the murder of his mother, Laci. Other signposts along the collision course include society's overwhelming rejection of partial-birth abortion and human cloning, and growing unease over the hundreds of thousands of frozen embryos stored in clinics.

Pro-abortion people have to bend into more and more twisted contortions to defend the killing of unborn children. In Newsweek, Bonnie Steinbock, chair of philosophy at the University at Albany, performs quite an acrobatic act when asked when life begins: "Eggs are alive, sperm is alive. Cancer tumors are alive. For me, what matters is this: When does it have the moral status of a human being? When does it have some kind of awareness of its surroundings?"

Her use of the word "it" to refer to the unborn child is telling -- and another signpost. Science and abortion collide every time parents see their child's face on a computer screen during a sonogram, print out the image and post the resuts on their refrigerator. That image is not of an "it."

Each time men and women gaze lovingly at those images and give them names, abortion is mortally wounded. Those parents know they cannot abort someone whose face they recognize, and it's becoming tougher for them to argue that others should.

(6/5/03) [[In-content Ad]]