Abortion

In Roman times, abortion and the destruction of unwanted children was permissible, but as our civilization has aged, it seems that such acts were no longer acceptable by rational human beings, so that in 1948, Canada along with most other nations in the world signed a declaration of the United Nations promising every human being the right to life. The World Medical Association meeting in Geneve at the same time stated that the utmost respect for human life was to be from the moment of conception. This declaration was re-affirmed when the World Medical Association met in Oslo in 1970. Should we go backwards in our concern for the life of an individual human being? The unborn human is still a human life and not all the wishful thinking of those advocating real of abortion laws, can alter this. Those of us who would seek to protect the human who is still to small to cry aloud for it’s own protection, have been accused of having a 19th century approach to life in the lat third of the 20th century. But who in reality is using arguments of a bygone century? It is an incontrovertible fact of biological science. Make no mistake, that from the moment of conception, a new human life has been created. Only those who allow their emotional passion to override their knowledge can deny it. Only those who are irrational or ignorant of science doubt that when a human sperm fertilizes a human ovum a new human being is created. A new human being who carries genes in its cells that make that human being uniquely different from any and other human being and yet, undeniably a member, as we all are, of the great human family. The entire fetus needs to grow into a baby, a child, and grow into old age. It is determined at that very moment of conception whether the baby will be a boy or a girl: which of his parents he will look like: what blood type he will have. His whole heritage is forever fixed. Look at a human being 8 weeks after conception and you, yes every person here who can tell the difference between a man and a woman, will be able to look at the fetus and tell me whether it is a baby boy or a girl. No, a fetus is not just another part of a woman’s body like an appendix or appendage. These appendages, these perfectly formed tiny feet belong to a 10 week developed baby, not to his or her mother. The fetus is distinct and different and has its own heart beat. Do you know that the fetus’ heart started beating just 18 days after a new life was created, beating before the mother even knew she was pregnant? By 3 months of pregnancy the developing baby is just small enough to be held in the palm of a man’s hand but look closely at a picture of a three month old fetus, you will see all his organs are formed and all his systems working. As you may know, in 1969, the abortion laws were changed in Canada, so that it became legal for a doctor to perform an abortion if a committee of 3 other doctors in an accredited hospital deemed that continuation of the pregnancy constituted a severe threat to the life and health, mental or physical of the women. Threat to health was not defined and so it is variously interpreted to mean very real medical disease to anything that interferes with even social or economic well being, so that any unwanted or unplanned pregnancy thus qualifies.