Untangling the twisted logic of abortion

Last month marked the 39th year since the Roe v. Wade U.S. Supreme Court decision legalized abortion in the United States. While much has been said about this, one thing is absolutely clear: it’s getting difficult to logically argue that unborn humans are not human.

This is partly because 3D and 4D ultrasounds now provide women a remarkable view of their unborn babies, including detailed facial features that are unmistakably human.

Last month, Texas joined a growing number of states requiring abortion doctors to provide women with the option of seeing an ultrasound before she decides whether to go through with an abortion.

Another argument for the humanity of the unborn comes from the growing number of prematurely born babies who now grow into toddlerhood thanks to improved medical care. Last month, many newspapers and Internet sites published photos of a tiny girl who was released from a Los Angeles hospital. She began life at just 8 inches long, weighing 9.5 ounces. It is difficult to look at this cute baby girl and not recall that she is the same size at which many unborn babies are aborted.

The logical person asks: “If this little girl is protected from murder, why aren’t the other little unborn girls who are the same size?”

Finally, the humanity of the unborn is actually an objective scientific fact. Each life is unique, unrepeatable and biologically human — no respectable scientist would say otherwise. But if all unborn human babies are humans, then shouldn’t they enjoy the inalienable human right to life?

Answers to this question depend on whether you believe the right to life is an inalienable human right. Not everyone does. In fact, before the Nazis began their harrowing murder of the Jews the government quietly eliminated Germans who were deemed “incurably ill.”

According to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, the physically and mentally handicapped were viewed as “useless” to society, a threat to Aryan genetic purity and, ultimately, unworthy of life. At the beginning of World War II, individuals who were mentally retarded, physically handicapped or mentally ill were targeted for murder in what the Nazis called the “T-4,” or “euthanasia,” program.

The museum website goes on to explain that German doctors determined which people should die. Doomed patients were then transferred to six institutions in Germany and Austria, where they were killed in gas chambers. Handicapped infants and children were killed by lethal injection or by starvation. Between 1940 and 1945, about 200,000 handicapped people were murdered.

At the core, the argument for these murders is twofold: first, it was determined that certain people do not have enough desirable qualities to merit an inalienable right to life; secondly, certain people are too great a burden on society.

This line of thought is remarkably similar to the more contemporary argument for abortion.

Few abortion advocates deny the unborn are biologically human. Rather, they argue that these lives are undeveloped and fail to share essential human qualities that would ensure their right to life.

Additionally, they argue that the present and future burden an unborn baby places on a mother is sufficient that the mother should be able to decide whether to have the child extinguished.

Unfortunately, more than 50 million babies have lost their lives to this old, twisted logic that each new generation must untangle.

Joel Davidson is editor of the Catholic Anchor, the official newspaper and news website (catholicanchor.org) of the Archdiocese of Anchorage. He is a longtime Palmer resident and former reporter for the Mat-Su Valley Frontiersman.

Opinions expressed on the Faith page are the author’s and are not necessarily those of the Mat-Su Valley Frontiersman, its staff or its parent company, Wick Communications Co. To submit a column or other news for the Faith page, send email to news@frontiersman.com, or call 352-2268.