Wednesday, April 8, 2009

Abortion and the election

The editor of my campus newspaper published an article entitled “Thou shalt not assume” complaining that pro-life people were erroneously calling supporters of Obama, “baby-killers.” If they publish my response at all, it will not be out in time for the election so I thought I’d post it below:

To the editor:

I read your article "Thou shalt not assume." I appreciate your courage in taking a stand that is probably not very popular on this campus.

I agree with you that voting for Obama does not make someone a baby killer.

Many people on both sides of the debate argue about whether or not the fetus is a "person" or whether the fetus has a "soul." This really just clouds up the issue.

The undisputed scientific fact is that the fetus is human.

It is entirely arbitrary to apply the commandment, "Thou shalt not murder" to a human two minutes (or two months) after he or she is born, but not to a human two minutes (or two months) before he or she is born.

Barack Obama understands this. This is precisely why Obama fought so hard against the “Born-Alive Infants Protection Act.”

Obama understood that if the product of a failed abortion has the constitutional right to life, then that same human baby should also have had those rights before the abortion was attempted. But as a constitutional scholar, Obama understood that this would endanger abortion “rights” in America.

Therefore, rather than concede the scientific fact that unborn babies are human, and therefore have a constitutional right to life, Obama argued strongly in favor of allowing living babies who had survived abortion to be left alone to die in a cold, stainless steel pan!

Beside the fact that this is just plain evil, if living babies do not have a constitutional right to life, what is to prevent society (and an Obama Supreme Court) from deciding that babies born with mental or physical defects do not have the right to life either?

What Obama seems to forget is that this is the same kind of arbitrariness that led people over 150 years ago to argue that those with black skin are not really "persons" and don't have a soul. The result was a horrendous evil!

Considering the enormous number of unborn babies killed in America (a disproportionate percentage of which are black), the result of the pro-choice position is really not much different than the result of genocide.

If we had a candidate for President who was practically perfect in every way, except for the fact that he or she supported genocide, would we support that candidate anyway? Would we really just say, "Well, the issue is complicated and after all, we don't want to be one-issue voters"?

I don't think so.

So no, I don't think voting for Obama makes someone a baby-killer. But I am convinced that voting for Obama does support the killing of a huge number of babies in violation of God's command.