Today is January 22nd. It's my little sister's birthday. It's also "Roe Day," the 38th anniversary of the U. S. Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade decision, which claimed a Constitutional right for abortion.
I'm not going to go through an argument about when human life begins. I can do that, and I've never lost an argument on the subject. The closest I ever got to losing one, in fact, was with a Canadian druid who tried rewriting the dictionary while we debated. He wound up saying that since my argument made logical sense, logic itself must be rejected. (No, I'm not exaggerating for effect. He managed to throw me for a loop on that one.)
Instead, I want to make a different point. You see, whether or not a child counts as a human being when inside the womb, the most ardent pro-abortionist admits that the eventual result, if an abortion is not performed, will be a human person. A thinking, breathing, growing, living human person.
By the most conservative estimate out there, more than 50 million human persons are missing from the world today as a sole consequence of Roe v. Wade.
I crunched some numbers. That is a huge number, after all. In the words of one famous dictator, a million deaths is a statistic, and this is fifty million. How can we wrap our heads around this?
Well, first of all, the entire combined population of the top ten largest cities in the United States is . . . wait for it . . . 24 million. Less than half. You could triple the size of the ten largest U. S. cities with the number of people that would have lived were it not for the legal manslaughter of more than fifty million children whose only crime was to be conceived at an inconvenient time.
Need another one? Let's just take our most populated city, New York. You could fill the Big Apple six times over with that many children. Think about it. Six New Yorks, and not a one of these residents would be over the age of 38. They wouldn't even be hitting their midlife crises yet.
The population of the entire United States is only 300 million. It would have been 350 million. One-seventh of our population is missing.
If we were to say that one-seventh of our population is denied health care, the left would be up in arms. Instead, they are denied health at all . . . and this is celebrated.
It's sickening.
If you don't agree, then ask yourself why we deny a person the right to life. Why do we say that a mother has the right of life and death over her child as long as he's inside her; but once he's been born she can't spank him when he misbehaves? The UN's declaration on "the Rights of the Child" lay out such things as a restriction on what a parent may and may not teach his or her children; but nowhere does it say that a child only gains these "rights" upon taking his first breath of air.
My little sister turns twenty-two today. She is a vibrant, healthy, successful young woman. She has a promising career and a loving boyfriend. You could look at her and imagine that she could do anything she wants.
You would never guess from looking at her that twenty-two years and one day ago she would have been declared a lifeless lump of tissue, with no right to that future existence. She was born in a third-world country, with no bright future ahead of her. Her mother chose to bring her into the world. My sister was orphaned soon afterwards, but was quickly adopted by an American family who loves her. We literally forget that she's not related to us by blood.
Where she was born, children were often seen merely as a burden, worth less than a farm animal; female children even more so. Here in the United States, we have institutionalized an even more horrendous practice: denied even the status of being human. The former is tragic; the latter is unconscionable.
Pro-lifers often talk about the potential loss of another Einsein or Bach or da Vinci, but I wonder about the ordinary folk. The bright, young, vibrant people who shape the world with every act they make and every day they live.
How many more like like my sister have we lost?
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