“Why are you pro-life?” A stranger walks up to me and asks me this question. I stop still for a moment before replying “How could I be otherwise?” A thousand images flash through my mind in mere seconds . . . a father in tears after his girlfriend aborts his child, a frightened young girl seeking rest at the abortion clinic only to be plagued with regret for years, the bloody form of a murdered child lying in a disposal bin, hundreds of children slaughtered every day with no one to shed tears on their behalf. How could any sane, compassionate human being look on these atrocities caused by abortion and yet not be pro-life?
I am pro-life because I have a duty to mourn for the millions upon millions of human beings who never had the chance to see the world, who never had the chance to experience love, who never had the chance to live. I am pro-life because I don’t think anyone has the right to decide whether or not an innocent child has the right to live, under any circumstance. In the words of Ronald Reagan, “We cannot survive as a free nation when some men are not fit to live and should be abandoned to abortion or infanticide.”
The fact that the majority of American citizens condones or ignores the murder of millions of children is chilling. Is this a nation which you would be proud to swear allegiance to? I am pro-life because I cannot exist silently in a nation where murder is a commonplace happening condoned by political leaders and mainstream journalists. Since the legalization of abortion in the United States in 1973, the moral condition of the nation has been going steadily downhill. Not only have divorce rates been growing, but fewer people are getting married in the first place. The value of human life is decreasing as comatose patients are deprived of nutrition, elderly men and women are denied care, physicians assist in suicide the patients they were once sworn to heal, and scientists “create” human beings in test tubes. Alexis de Tocqueville said, “America is great because she is good. If America ceases to be good, America will cease to be great.”
Some find it unbelievable that I am pro-life simply because I am a young female. That sentiment confuses me and frankly, it rather frightens me as well. Are young women supposed to be uncompassionate and unconcerned about the suffering present in the world around them? Are we supposed to be concerned about nothing but our reproductive rights? Despite the misconceptions of many, however, I am most passionately pro-life.
Words on a page, thoughts in my mind, sentiments expressed to my like-minded friends – these are not enough. I say that I am pro-life now, but none of these reasons make me pro-life in actuality if I do not act on my conviction that life is precious and that abortion is wrong. Writing an article on the reasons behind my pro-life beliefs isn’t going save the lives being taken even as I write these words. Children are dying. What am I doing? Merely calling myself pro-life is not enough. We look back now upon World War II and wonder how average German families let atrocities occur down the street and yet go on with their everyday lives. How are we really any better? I dread to think what our descendants will say about us, living more or less normally while children are slaughtered at the nearest clinic. Abortion is not merely a topic to be skimmed over by politicians on the debate platform. It is not merely a procedure carried out in Planned Parenthood clinics across the world. Instead, abortion is all the gaping empty spaces in my life of which I am not even aware. It is broken families comprised of missing children, grieving mothers, and mournful fathers. Remember always the words of Edmund Burke: “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing”. Remember the children whose deaths are not acknowledged, remember the women who suffer in silence. Remember what it means to be-pro-life.
