Abortion, destroyer of peace

Dear Editor,

On February 3, 1994, the late St. Mother Teresa of Calcutta, India spoke at the National Prayer Breakfast held in Washington D.C.  Mother Teresa was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979.  President Bill Clinton and his wife Hillary along with Vice President Al Gore and his wife Tipper were in attendance along with other political leaders and distinguished guests.  I will share a few quotes from her speech as an introduction to my response to last week's editorial in the "Opinion" segment of the Dodgeville Chronicle.

"But I feel that the greatest destroyer of peace today is abortion, because it is a war against the child, a direct killing of the innocent child...and if we accept that a mother can kill her own child, how can we tell other people not to kill one another?...Any country that accepts abortion is not teaching its people to love, but to use any violence to get what they want.  This is why the greatest destroyer of love and peace is abortion."

I was a sophomore in high school in January of 1973 when Roe vs. Wade and Doe vs Bolton, the two United States Supreme Court (SCOTUS) decisions that came down and "created" the so-called right to terminate/destroy an unborn child. Approximately 64 million surgical abortions were performed during those 49 years of "legal" abortion up to the SCOTUS Dobbs decision issued in June of 2022 that tossed the abortion debate back to the states.  The war rages on!

When conception/fertilization takes place, a new life has been created as I learned in my sophomore biology class.  There are now two patients to treat, and the goal of the physician and medical community should be "Do No Harm".  Medical personnel should do their professional best to save life and not destroy it.  Yes - sometimes hard decisions must be made that could potentially result in the loss of the unborn child.  In reality, the vast majority of all abortions taking place in our nation have nothing to do with the pregnancies presented in the opinion column of Feb. 22, 2024.

The writer states "pregnancy with a defective fetus must be terminated."  What do we mean by the word defective?  For example, in Iceland they have maybe one or two Down Syndrome (trisomy 21) births per year.  Why so few?  Parents choose abortion rather than raising a child with Down's.  In our country the majority of couples who learn through prenatal testing that their unborn child has trisomy 21, also choose to abort.  What does this say about our culture?  That's part of the legacy of Roe. If you have ever attended a Special Olympics event or met a child with Down Syndrome, they are so loving.  Angels on earth.

An unborn child is a human being in its earliest stage of development and not a piece of property to be discarded as if it was medical waste. This devaluation of human life in the womb has led to a further devaluation of human life outside the womb. Take a look at the evening news and you get a sense of the violence and total lack of respect we have for each other.  Until we truly respect, defend, and protect "all" human life from conception until natural death, I see our country and world continuing its downward spiral.

St. Mother Teresa's 1994 National Prayer Breakfast speech is as relevant today as it was thirty years ago.

Patrick Hardyman

Blanchardville, WI