If you were to listen exclusively to pro-aborts, you would get the idea that pro-lifers are a bunch of religious extremist nutjobs, out to force their beliefs on the rest of the country because, JESUS! For many people in the pro-life movement, this has somewhat of a basis in reality, though the vast majority are just your regular, run-of-the-mill Christians looking to save lives. Many pro-lifers feel that their faith and their calling to save the unborn go hand-in-hand. I’m just not one of them.
I despise hearing abortion advocates screech about the elusive separation of church and state (which doesn’t actually exist), using it as an argument for why abortion should be legal. And that’s because my faith has absolutely nothing to do with my pro-life views.
The fact that I’m Catholic may make this surprising. Catholicism and pro-life are practically synonymous. And because I’m Catholic, I always felt personally pro-life. But I struggled with using my faith as the sole reason to fight for the pro-life movement. I didn’t know if it was right to force something that I felt onto other people, if the only reason I felt that way was because of my religious beliefs. I needed more.
Luckily, the science is on the pro-life side. Just having a basic understanding of embryology should be enough for anyone to understand that, at the moment of conception, there is a completely separate life from the mother. The baby, even when it is a tiny zygote, already has their own DNA strand. It has already been decided whether the baby is a boy or a girl, what color hair they will have, everything. The baby may reside inside the mother’s body, but he or she is in no way just a part of the mother. Learning more about the science behind pregnancy and embryology was the extra push I needed to take me from personally pro-life, to willing to fight to abolish abortion.
