Keep government out of personal choices

A few weeks back, my U.S. History class created posters that expressed our opinions on many controversial and important issues such as animal rights, gay marriage and my choice, abortion. In a heated debate between my history teacher and myself, I expressed my view that abortion is not a government matter.

According to the American Blog Elections website, 2012 presidential hopeful Mitt Romney wants to make abortions illegal, overthrowing the U.S. Supreme Court case of Roe vs. Wade, which allows women to receive abortions.

Morally, pro-life may be the right choice for Romney and his family, but this isn’t the case for many Americans. Women everywhere are unprepared to have children or unable to raise a child properly, not to mention that women fall victim to rape every day in America.

According to the U.S. Department of Justice, a woman is raped every two minutes somewhere in America, and Eternal Perspective Ministries online states that 14,000 abortions per year are due to rape or incest.

Imagine if you were part of a rape statistic and wound up pregnant from the assault. You have no idea who your attacker was. This will result in many issues down the road for your unplanned child.

First off, the mother will have no medical records to compare to when the child is born and starts to grow. This can be very difficult for health care for the child. What if the attacker had an STD, cancer, mental diseases or physical deformities that can now be passed down to the child?

Also, what is most unfair to these children is that they will not know the identities of their fathers. Sure, if the woman is lucky enough to have a man who is willing to help take care of the baby and step in as his father that is great. But it is truly devastating for the child to not know who he or she really belongs to.

Another aspect to consider when speaking of abortion is a situation where a parent or parents cannot efficiently raise the child. Logically, if you know you can’t take care of a child, you shouldn’t be participating in actions that could possibly lead to having one. Yet, there are times when you may think you are stable and ready, but you really aren’t.

Abortion would not seem that inhumane of an action if you suddenly loose your job, and with no income coming in you loose your residence. With no way of raising a child, sometimes you have to take drastic measures to ensure that you can continue to take care of yourself and save the baby from a bad start.

Now, adoption is always an option, but sometimes this may not be the best idea. I do not want to further the misconception that adoption is a bad choice, though. Many loving families adopt children and raise them properly, and the child grows up happily.

But for children who are not so lucky, they can be shuffled around from foster home to foster home, new family to new family, never in a steady spot. This is quite unfair to the child, who deserves to be in a stable, loving, living environment.

According to the Angelfire website, children are more apt to be physically and sexually abused, and even murdered, while under the protection of foster parents. In June 2011, Sean Brooks, a foster father, was accused of beating his foster daughter to death. The young girl had only lived with this foster family for six months, but her foster father reportedly abused her multiple times before her tragic death.

Knowing all this, I don’t see how any political figure can have the audacity to say, “This is not your right to abort a child.” If you think about it, it is the equivalent of taking a dying person off life support; it is a conscious, moral and family choice. Cutting off life support isn’t illegal, but it is the equivalent to ending someone’s life.

People in political power need to realize that moral and conscious issues have no place in the political world. The government should have no say in something it didn’t create.

Holly Brett is a three-year journalism student, and this is her first year writing for the School’s Page.