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Dear Neighbors:
There has been much in the news about abortion laws. Our country went down a tragic path when we gave women the option to legally end the life of a baby in the womb. Many of us, if given an option through a law, might do something that we otherwise wouldn't do. What are the arguments?
1) A woman has a right to choose what happens with her own body. I assume you can insert the words man/his in that statement as well. But what if it hurts someone else? Then we have laws. For example, a person cannot ingest as much alcohol as they want, and then get in a car. Do people have a right to make a choice about their own body, when the decision endangers the life of another? We can see in food and drug regulations that we, as a country, protect life in the womb by what we deem unsafe. Why did we end the use of Thalidomide, by pregnant women? Because it caused severe birth defects. Yet, we allow abortion? It doesn't make sense.
2) Is the "thing" inside the pregnant woman, a human being? Well, we have billions and billions of examples of what is in there. We knew this even before ultrasound images were available. No other species has come from a woman. It is a human being, at a particular stage of development. Like it or not, human beings come from women.
3) But isn't it okay to have an abortion if the baby isn't yet viable, or able to survive? Of course the baby can't survive, if you take it out of conditions it is meant to live in. None of us can survive in an environment that we aren't designed to be living in, at certain stages of development. We all can't survive under water. A baby in the womb can. Perhaps the question should be, is the baby viable in the womb? Also, a baby that can survive outside the womb, can only be viable, or survive, if some other human being takes care of it. We have been created to be in relationship with others. The first relationship we ever have is with our mother, when we are in the womb.
Nancy Tews, Dodgeville