A Big Message from a Small Mouth

Fighting the Fight for Life

As I sat down at my desk this morning and pulled up the Yahoo! webpage, I noticed a featured article entitled "Florida Baby as Small as Pen Goes Home." What? A pen? As in a writing utensil? As I read on, I discovered that this baby was born at 21 weeks and 6 days into pregnancy. In essence, we're talking about a fetus that is only 153 days old. Amillia, the baby, was under 10 ounces at birth.

This miraculous story begs the question of the ethical nature of abortion. According to religioustolerance.org, about 140,000 abortions occur each year during the second trimester of pregnancy. Many pro-choice advocates would argue that a developing baby inside of the women during the second trimester is a "fetus." The terminology of "fetus" versus "baby" or "child" has less to do with the semantical nature of things, but rather more to do with demeaning the developing pre-natal life form to a possession of the mother. If the baby, or fetus, is a belonging to the mother, she then can decide how to deal with it. If she chooses not to keep the fetus, that sounds awfully better than to not keep a baby.

But my question is this. How can a baby that is 21 weeks and 6 days into it's life be a baby on the outside of the womb and a fetus on the inside? It's the same living being, just in a different location. If this baby is capable of surviving outside of the womb, how can anyone possibly justify the cruelty that is abortion.

According to a website that I found, ldi.org, second trimester abortions are done through a process referred to as Dilation and Evacuation. It's name is pretty self-evident in how the procedure is carried oftlineout. First, the mother must be dilated to the extent that the doctor can insert the equivalent to medical "pliers" into the uterus and pluck pieces of the unborn fetus out of the mother until it is fully extracted. I find it interesting that we have political debates about torturing enemies over seas by such techniques as water-boarding and the ethical nature of how we treat P.O.W.s. Yet, we completely justify the grotesque murder of innocent unborn children.