To the editor:
In 1973 a sharply divided Supreme Court concluded that a pregnant women’s ill defined “right to privacy” allowed her to abort the infant within her womb on demand — unburdened by any Constitutional constraints at least up until an equally ill defined point of “viability outside the womb.” It remains incomprehensible to me that the highest court in the land could so easily trump the most fundamental right of all — the right to life — without seriously confronting the equally fundamental question of when human life actually begins!
Over the 46 years since then, the unfortunate consequence of that misguided ruling has been the elimination of over 61 million innocent human lives. The key issue here is of course is the question of when a human life actually begins.
In fairness to the 1973 Court, scientific clarity regarding that question has only recently been provided by advanced diagnostic techniques including ultra sound imaging. It is now clear that brain waves and human heartbeats are detectable as early as six weeks into a pregnancy — the same heartbeats that are detectable at six months as well as at the birth of the infant.
The fertilized egg at the moment of conception does somehow seem to consistently emerge as a human baby at birth!
One might have hoped that this evidence would be sufficiently compelling to seriously question the morality of virtually any abortion. However a several decade cultural/moral descent to a much a lower bar of moral certitude somehow gives credibility to the proposition that if an attempted—but failed—abortion procedure was “ethically permissible” then the post delivery killing (murder) of the still living infant is justified because the moral status of the infant is only comparable to that of a fetus! The utter depravity of this argument seems to have escaped the New York state legislature which recently proposed to repeal legal protections for those infants surviving abortion attempts, and allow the dismembering of a full term baby at the point of delivery!
Ultimately the only way out of the current “culture of death” is for this nation to accept the full implication of divine and natural law and accept that each unique human life is created by God at the moment of conception for reasons that only God fully understands. Surely this nation — blessed beyond any others by God — must put an end to the abominable stain of abortion on the national soul.
David A. Nealy
Greenwood
