Editor,
A few weeks ago, my wife and I went to UNM Hospital to have an ultrasound. My wife is pregnant with our fifth child. After two consecutive miscarriages, it is difficult to not expect the same result with this pregnancy. There is a mixture of hope, worry and unexpressed joy for fear of disappointment.
Thankfully, it appears that this baby is staying with us. The radiologist determined that the baby was 7 ounces, a little more than 5 inches long, had a heartbeat of 146 beats per minute and was 18-weeks old. The radiologist also determined that the baby is a girl.
The radiologist had a bit of a difficult time doing her work because the baby was moving around. I was amazed that the baby was able to move so well at such a young age. She made us all laugh. We counted her toes and fingers and attentively watched her.
Yet in the back of my mind, I was thinking that 18 weeks into gestation, based on New Mexico abortion laws, for four more weeks my wife and I could go to Planned Parenthood or some other abortion clinic and have an abortion. We could pay the clinic a couple hundred dollars, and the doctor would terminate the pregnancy by ending the life of our daughter.
The doctor would not end the life of our daughter by a lethal injection, the common form of death penalty used in the U.S. for brutal criminals. The doctor would reach into the uterus and pull her out in pieces. The doctor would put her into a biological waste bag and send her out with the trash.
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I have an extremely difficult time thinking that our forefathers and all the men and women who have died and sacrificed to create this country did so in order to pave the way for women or parents to have the right to end the lives of their unborn children. I see abortion as the greatest contradiction today of the principles this country was founded on - that all people are created equal, and all people have the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
The U.S. is founded upon inalienable individual rights. However, when one person's rights result in another person being dismembered and tossed in the trash, that is wrong. The founders of the U.S., who revolted against taxation without representation, would call us cowards for remaining silently complicit in the face of the outright destruction of millions of human beings who are in a stage of life that prevents them from defending and speaking up for themselves.
Benjamin P. Sanchez
UNM alumnus
