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| The Right to Life In Words Even A Liberal Should Understand | ||||
| By Joseph A. Crisp, II | ||||
| The Christian community is often at a loss for words to explain the tragedy of abortion in a way its liberal supporters are able to understand. To a liberal, abortion is not about a human child, a tiny being which can eat, breath, move, taste, touch and feel; in fact it is not about life and death at all. Rather, to them it is about civil rights, the civil right of a woman to do what she likes with her own body. Since they cannot seem to move beyond this perspective, conservatives must then change their own argument so that these confused people can comprehend the inhumanity of what they are supporting. | ||||
| Liberals are often fond of stating that all conflict in the world can be reduced to a matter of property, between those who have it, those who control it, and those who do not. Let's start from there then, an area the left is familiar with. The liberals say that a woman's body is her own, her own property if you will, and she should be free to do whatever she likes with her own body, her control over it, and anything living inside of it, being absolute and sacrosanct. Her body is her own, therefore the child inside her is her own and she must have every right to do with it as she pleases. | ||||
| In fact, such an argument would make more sense coming from a right-wing, feudalist conservative. It is an argument that liberals have already spent years trying to demolish. If I own a piece of land, it is my private property, yet not everything on my property, particularly living things, belong completely to me. For example, if a deer wandered onto my property and I killed it out of season, I would owe the government a replacement fee for shooting the deer which, according to the law, belongs to them, the lawful representatives of the people. | ||||
| Environmental laws and zoning ordinances are enacted because private property rights extend only so far. They exist because all people have an interest in the state of the environment and because all residents have an interest in the state of their community. Likewise, the children of the future are something everyone, even those without children, have a vested interest in. Again, this is in fact a liberal invention. Remember what Hillary Clinton said, "It takes a village"? Liberals seem to have so much compassion for nature and wildlife, perhaps they should keep in mind that humans are also part of the ecosystem which we should not be tampering with. | ||||
| Nor have the liberals shown themselves to be against telling people what they can and cannot do to their own bodies in the name of health and welfare. Consider why it is that liberals will uphold the right of a woman to destroy a living being within her own body, simply because it is her body to do with as she pleases; yet these same liberals will litigate, tax, propagandize and even take dramatic license with the truth at times to stop a smoker from doing damage to a part of his or her own body, is this not hypocrisy? Why does the smoker not have the same sacrosanct rights to do what he likes to his own body? | ||||
| Is it not ironic that the same people who fight against the right of one person to put something harmful in their body will also fight for the right of another person to expel something good from their body, if we can at least agree that all human life is good? Is it not the slightest bit hypocritical to say that a woman has a right to destroy a child inside her own body, yet a property owner cannot chop down a particular species of tree on his own property? Perhaps they believe that civil rights are superior to property rights, or in other words, that all rights are not created equal. | ||||
| Well, in the event that this is the case, let us consider abortion from the aspect of civil rights as well. Starting in the 1920's feminist leaders began to claim the civil rights of women, which included the power over their own means to reproduce, namely by demanding the right to use artificial contraceptives. They argued that this would give women many rights which the society ruled by Christian morals had so long denied them. A woman could have just as much casual sex as men without having to worry about an unwanted pregnancy and being "tied down" with a child. This would give women power over their own bodies they said, and many people listened. | ||||
| The laws were changed and slowly even the Christian community came to accept this once outrageous idea as simply another inevitable progressive development along the lines of universal suffrage. Starting in 1930 with the Anglican Communion the churches began to back down and decided that contraception, and the rights it gave to women to control their own bodies was okay after all (the sole exception being the Catholic Church, whose Pope Pius XI warned that this was the first step to acceptance of abortion, the breakdown of marriage and society as they knew it). | ||||
| The left fought for these changes in the law, won them, and eventually won over society to their view that women had a right to control whether or not they became pregnant. Yet, since this is true, how can it be explained that women also have a civil right to now end a pregnancy when they have already won the right to decide whether or not to have the pregnancy at all (saving in cases of rape of course)? To put it another way, this would be similar to someone demanding the right to vote, then consequently demanding the right to take their vote back if they have second thoughts about the candidate. Why should women need a civil right to end pregnancy when the argument for the legalization of contraceptives was that women had a civil right to choose to become pregnant or to continue having intercourse while blocking the possibility of pregnancy? | ||||
| The fact that the civil right of women to have access to contraceptives and placing the giving of life solely in human hands means that there is no grounds for a civil right to then take that life away. Once a woman is pregnant her civil rights have already been exercised and it is then time to deal with the consequences of her choice. It has been well established that greater freedom brings greater responsibility, which no liberal can deny. Once life has begun, the woman has made use of her rights, now the rights of the new life must be taken into account, the lack of which liberals might be comfortable calling "age discrimination". Once born, after all, the mother still has the right to put the child up for adoption. | ||||
| According to liberals, private property rights should have strict limitations, life and the balance of nature should be protected and the government does have the right to stop people from doing harm to their own bodies, and we should never take civil rights lightly. Therefore, for all of these reasons, liberals should unite with conservatives in calling for an end to abortion. | ||||