The pro-choice factions would like us to believe that abortion is all about the woman. The “It’s My Body” party line has been shoved down our throats for years now, and the notion that fathers should have a say in whether or not their child is aborted is simply preposterous to them. But the reach of abortion’s sinister arm goes much further than the woman. It affects each of us.
No one likes to believe that every decision we make affects other people. But it’s true. From the most minuscule choice of skipping work to the giant decision of who we marry, our choices have consequences for people other than us. Abortion included. Abortion doesn’t just end the life of a woman’s child. It takes the life of someone’s cousin, someone’s grandchild, someone’s best friend, someone’s spouse, someone’s mother. It wipes out generations that could have been, that should have been. While “potential person”, the new favorite pro-choice term for fetus, is taking over the sound waves, a fetus is in all actuality and scientific detail really a “person with potential”.
Each unborn is a live human being. Each has the potential to change the world, no matter what her circumstances. Each unborn has a right to fulfill her destiny, whether it be to cure cancer, to become a mother, to be someone’s wife. Think about your own spouse, your own best friend. Everyone close to you could have been lost through abortion. How different your life would be. Yet each day, thousands of soulmates and best friends are murdered at the hands of their mothers. They are denied the opportunity to love, to learn, to laugh, and to leave their mark on this world.
Valerie Tarico
I recently read an older blog on The Huffington Post called, My Abortion Baby. The author, Valerie Tarico, admits that her wonderful daughter wouldn’t exist if she hadn’t aborted her first child, whom she wanted but whom may have had “possible blindness and brain lesions” due to acute toxoplasmosis. She writes of her and her husband’s decision, “We both wanted a baby. But it also felt irresponsible to gamble. Not only would we would be taking a chance on the quality of life of our first child, but potentially committing any future children to a life of caretaking that they had no option to choose or reject. We would be risking our own ability to give to the community around us – and possibly creating a situation in which our family needed to suck more out of society than we could put back into it. As painful as the decision felt, our moral values were clear, and we scheduled to terminate the pregnancy.”
She says their morals were clear. What’s clear is that she put everything above the life of her child, who was not guaranteed to be anything but normal. She put community and her future children first, even saying that it wouldn’t be fair to them that they may have to care for a sibling in 30 years. Instead of allowing her future children to make that decision, she took their choice and sibling away because that child ran the risk of not being perfect.
She says, “Instead of a child who spends a (short or long) lifetime struggling to be and do the things we cherish most, we have a daughter who is loving and generous and playful and strong and way smarter and more disciplined than her mama will ever be.” Will her daughter have survivor’s guilt? Perhaps. But no matter what, what she and her husband did was to take a precious baby away from a grandmother who was already suffering the loss of her husband. They took a sibling away from future children, and they denied the life of any child they would have conceived had they continued with the first pregnancy. They deprived themselves the opportunity to know and love their first child, whom, disabilities or not, would have brought them immeasurable joy. They changed everything.
Unborn humans are persons with the potential to do anything with their lives, if only they are given the chance. Abortion survivors know this first hand, including Melissa Ohden, who looks at her children and knows that they wouldn’t exist if her mother’s attempt to abort her hadn’t failed. On her site there is this quote: “One decision, one single moment, can have such a detrimental impact on so many people, living and dead, born and yet to be conceived.”
