There is a lot of debate in the so-called “pro-choice” camp about when an unborn child is a “person”, and when it is merely a mass of cells that can be terminated with no qualms.
Since I am a Christian, I like looking at what God says about the issue first.
Some selected passages on the topic:
God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them. God blessed them; and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it; and rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over every living thing that [b]moves on the earth.” {Genesis 1}
Surely I will require your lifeblood; from every beast I will require it. And from every man, from every man’s brother I will require the life of man. “Whoever sheds man’s blood, By man his blood shall be shed, For in the image of God He made man. “As for you, be fruitful and multiply; Populate the earth abundantly and multiply in it.” {Genesis 9}
If men struggle with each other and strike a woman with child so that she gives birth prematurely, yet there is no injury, he shall surely be fined as the woman’s husband may demand of him, and he shall pay as the judges decide. But if there is any further injury, then you shall appoint as a penalty life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, bruise for bruise. {Exodus 21} [Yes – this was given directly to the nation of Israel, but certainly it should be noted as how serious God viewed the offense in His people.]
For You formed my inward parts; You wove me in my mother’s womb. {Psalm 139}
Since I am interested in history, I like looking at what previous generations did:
Eugenics – `the “applied science or the bio-social movement which advocates the use of practices aimed at improving the genetic composition of a population”, usually a human population.` {wikipedia}
The philosophy was most famously expounded by Plato, who believed human reproduction should be monitored and controlled by the state.
Other ancient civilizations, such as Rome, Athens[44] and Sparta, practiced infanticide through exposure as a form of phenotypic selection. In Sparta, newborns were inspected by the city’s elders, who decided the fate of the infant. If the child was deemed incapable of living, it was usually exposed in the Apothetae near the Taygetus mountain.
After reading Darwin’s Origin of Species, [Sir Francis] Galton built upon Darwin’s ideas whereby the mechanisms of natural selection were potentially thwarted by human civilization. He reasoned that, since many human societies sought to protect the underprivileged and weak, those societies were at odds with the natural selection responsible for extinction of the weakest; and only by changing these social policies could society be saved from a “reversion towards mediocrity”, a phrase he first coined in statistics and which later changed to the now common “regression towards the mean”…In 1904 he clarified his definition of eugenics as “the science which deals with all influences that improve the inborn qualities of a race; also with those that develop them to the utmost advantage”.
Charles Davenport, a scientist from the United States, stands out as one of history’s leading eugenicists. He took eugenics from a scientific idea to a worldwide movement implemented in many countries. Davenport obtained funding to establish the Biological Experiment Station at Cold Spring Harbor in 1904 and the Eugenics Records Office in 1910, which provided the scientific basis for later Eugenic policies such as enforced sterilization.
[In the UK] it was supported by many prominent figures of different political persuasions before World War I, including: Liberal economists William Beveridge and John Maynard Keynes; Fabian socialists such as Irish author George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells and Sidney Webb; and Conservatives such as the future Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Arthur Balfour.
In 1907 Indiana became the first of more than thirty states to adopt legislation aimed at compulsory sterilization of certain individuals. Although the law was overturned by the Indiana Supreme Court in 1921, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of a Virginia law allowing for the compulsory sterilization of patients of state mental institutions in 1927.
Some states sterilized “imbeciles” for much of the 20th century. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the 1927 Buck v. Bell case that the state of Virginia could sterilize those it thought unfit. The most significant era of eugenic sterilization was between 1907 and 1963, when over 64,000 individuals were forcibly sterilized under eugenic legislation in the United States. A favorable report on the results of sterilization in California, the state with the most sterilizations by far, was published in book form by the biologist Paul Popenoe and was widely cited by the Nazi government as evidence that wide-reaching sterilization programs were feasible and humane.
When Nazi administrators went on trial for war crimes in Nuremberg after World War II, they justified the mass sterilizations (over 450,000 in less than a decade) by citing the United States as their inspiration. The Nazis had claimed American eugenicists inspired and supported Hitler’s racial purification laws, and failed to understand the connection between those policies and the eventual genocide of the Holocaust.
The idea of Social Darwinism was widespread among Brazil’s leading scientists, educators, social thinkers, as well as many elected officials, in the late 1800s and early 1900s. This led to the “Politica de Branqueamento” (Whitening Policies) set in practice in Brazil, in the early part of the 20th Century. This series of laws intended to enlarge the numbers of the white race in Brazil while reducing the numbers of descendents of African Slaves and Asians made the ground fertile for Eugenic theories.
Nazi Germany under Adolf Hitler was well known for eugenics programs which attempted to maintain a “pure” Aryan race through a series of programs that ran under the banner of racial hygiene. Among other activities, the Nazis performed extensive experimentation on live human beings to test their genetic theories, ranging from simple measurement of physical characteristics to the research for Otmar von Verschuer carried out by Karin Magnussen using “human material” gathered by Josef Mengele on twins and others at Auschwitz death camp. During the 1930s and 1940s, the Nazi regime forcibly sterilized hundreds of thousands of people whom they viewed as mentally and physically unfit, an estimated 400,000 between 1934 and 1937…The Nazis went further, however, killing tens of thousands of the institutionalized disabled through compulsory “euthanasia” programs such as Aktion T4.
In the early part of the Shōwa era, Japanese governments executed a eugenic policy to limit the birth of children with “inferior” traits, as well as aiming to protect the life and health of mothers.
Singapore practiced a limited form of eugenics that involved discouraging marriage between university graduates and nongraduates through segregation in matchmaking agencies, in the hope that the former would produce better children; and paid incentives for the uneducated to undergo sterilisation, among other procedures. The government introduced the “Graduate Mother Scheme” in the early 1980s to entice graduate women with incentives to get married, which was eventually scrapped due to public criticism and the implications it had on meritocracy.
A few scientific researchers such as psychologist Richard Lynn, psychologist Raymond Cattell, and scientist Gregory Stock have openly called for eugenic policies using modern technology
In Russia, one supporter of preventive eugenics is the president of the Independent Psychiatric Association of Russia Yuri Savenko, who justifies forced sterilization of women, which is practiced in Moscow psychoneurological nursing homes. He states that “one needs a more strictly adjusted and open control for the practice of preventive eugenics, which, in itself, is, in its turn, justifiable.”
The issue at hand is not whether you are “pro choice” – it is whether or not you are ProDeath. If you claim to be “pro-choice”, you have fully dehumanized the developing baby – and, by extrapolation, dehumanized humans.
I wrote about this a few years ago with why I would not vote for then-Senator Obama – he is pro-death. If personhood is up for redefinition, you will progress through the stages of Animal Farm – “All animals are equal” to “All animals are equal; some are more equal than others”. By allowing abortions for any reason of convenience, the mother’s life has been elevated above that of her child, and that makes the child no longer human.
If the unborn child is no longer human, then none of us are – and we might as well line up to be removed from the gene pool all at once, since we do not matter.
Are you Pro-Life? Or are you Pro-Death?