Editor,
Abortion-rights advocates should not cede the terms "pro-life" and "right to life" to the anti-abortion advocates. It is a woman's right to her own life that gives her the right to terminate a pregnancy. First, it is absurd to compare a mass of cells to the equivalent of an infant. Anyone with a rational mind can tell the difference. The issue here is the potential child - one that does not yet exist.
Consider a world in which abortion were illegal, a staple idea of those who oppose abortion's legality. Pregnant women who rationally desired to abort - whether because of accidental pregnancy, rape, birth defects or danger to their lives - would be forced to undergo 20 years of enslavement to the needs of children they did not want to give birth to. If not, they would be forced to attempt dangerous, back-alley abortions, the kind that crippled or killed untold numbers of women before Roe v. Wade. To prohibit abortion would be to sentence countless women to spiritual - and
sometimes literal - death.
People do not have sex to procreate. They have sex for pleasure. By individual choice, they engage in pleasure. There is a fundamental misunderstanding by many that sex should only entail the creation of children.
Our Constitution was drafted in recognition of these principles. It was designed not as a charter for government power, but rather as a protection against government power - most importantly, protection against invasion of individual rights by the government. For this reason, the Constitution enumerates the limited powers of the government, but not - as made clear in the Ninth Amendment - every individual right.
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The so-called pro-life movement is not a defender of human life. It is actually an enemy of human life and happiness. Its goal is to turn women into breeding mares whose bodies are owned by the state and whose rights, health and pursuit of happiness are sacrificed en masse, all in the name of dogmatic sacrifice to the prehuman.
Damian Erasmus
UNM alumnus
