Abortion is an abomination in the eyes of nature

Editor,

In my early 20s I didn’t care about the subject of abortion. I figured it was a woman’s right. The first president I voted for was President Bill Clinton, who was a major supporter of abortion. As I matured in my own education, I began to oppose legalized abortion more and more.

As an undergrad I had the opportunity to work with a professor who was doing early work in stem cell research. She was studying the pluripotency of the stem cells in the quail embryo. My lab work was to dissect the quail embryos and remove their early stage spinal cords, from which we would try to extract the stem cells. I dissected several hundred quail embryos. We would allow them to develop to a certain stage, crack open the shells and then dissect them. Looking through a microscope I could clearly see their early stage transparent hearts beating and the blood pumping through their young bodies. The quail were clearly alive.

From this experience and from studying human development, I know that a human being, even in the early stages of life, is alive. It’s not an amorphous clump of cells; it is a living organism in early stages of development. If left alone, given nutrients and time, the embryo will develop into a mature human being. As we all know, no one begins life as a fully developed human being. So does a mother or the parents, with the consent of the government and knowledge of the doctor, have the right to terminate the life of that newly created, living and developing human being?

I and many others say no. No such right exists in the U.S. Constitution. No such right exists in the laws of rational nature. God definitely does not grant this right to mothers or parents, to governments or doctors. Jesus taught that you will know a tree by its fruit. A good tree cannot bear bad fruit and a bad tree cannot bear good fruit.

Let’s examine the fruit of legalized abortion. In the United States since Roe v. Wade in 1973 there have been over 56 million abortions. This is much more than a statistic. This is 56 million unique and irreplaceable human beings who were killed in their early stages of life. Their unique personalities were never experienced, and all the potential good they could have done was prevented by abortion.

Look at how abortion is being used in countries like India and China, where women have much work to do toward equality. Sex-selective abortions are killing females by the millions. India had to make it illegal to advertise sex-selective abortions, although they don’t enforce the law. Given the policies on children in China and their preference for boys, females are intentionally aborted.

I often wonder how so many lives can be killed. A quote from St. Augustine’s City of God always comes to mind: “Peace vied with war in cruelty and surpassed it. For while war overthrew armed hosts, peace slew the defenseless.”

Sincerely

Benjamin Sanchez

UNM alumnus