To the sweet, beautiful, and intelligent young lady who came to me for help on her paper:

I would like to apologize if I gave you a hard time. I wanted to challenge your thought process, but since there is no such thing as not having a bias, I would like to take this forum to explain the reason why I am against legalized abortion. My hope is that you might consider my humble explanation with an open mind and a willingness to explore the facts and perspectives that make sense – even if you had never held them before.

Your paper topic was about finding strategies to make a moral decision about legal abortion, and I think the first strategy is to define. We must define what rights are and what life is. I continue to stress to you the importance of these definitions, because without them we cannot make an intellectually based moral decision.

Consider my logic:

1. Killing innocent people should not be legal.

2. Abortion kills innocent people.

3. Therefore, abortion should not be legal.

My first point is about the definition of rights. The pro-lifer makes the claim that all human beings have the right to life. It is apparent from the Declaration of Independence that God gave humans inalienable rights, one of them being life. It is also illegal to murder, and almost every civilization throughout time has had penalties and boundaries for killing human beings. In fact, sometimes murder laws are the most severe. Definitely there is evidence to establish that it is morally wrong to take away someone else’s right to life. Would you agree so far?

My second point is claiming that the unborn are living persons. They are alive, and they are human. The evidence that they are alive is found in the fact that if they were not, abortion would be unnecessary.

The evidence that they are human is found in biology. According to the Harvard Medical Institute, a human being has these traits: 46 chromosomes, human DNA, cell reproduction, reaction to stimuli, a metabolism, and growth. A baby, at the moment of fertilization, has all these traits. There is also a scientific law called The Law of Biogenesis which states that all creatures reproduce after their own kind. Dogs give birth to dogs, monkeys to monkeys, and humans to humans. So if a human woman is pregnant, we know by this law that she is pregnant with a human baby.

The unborn have their own heartbeat at three weeks, but abortions can be performed only at five weeks (at the earliest), so every abortion stops a beating heart. By the time many abortions are performed, the unborn can feel pain! Depending on their age, babies in the womb can laugh, cry, make faces, hear noises, and even pass gas.

So if I can prove that human beings have the inalienable right to life, and that the fetuses are living human beings, then I can logically conclude that abortion, since it takes away their right to live, is morally unacceptable.

A proponent of legal abortion must prove:

1. Why she has the right to choose to do whatever she wants with her own body. (If you recall, sometimes she does not have that right – as in the cases of suicide and drug abuse).

2. If a woman has a right to her own body, then doesn’t an unborn baby girl have that same right?

3. If women have a right to do what they want with their bodies, then legal abortion proponents must prove that the unborn are part of their mother’s body, and not a different entity (something I find impossible, seeing how the unborn have their own heartbeat, different DNA, a different blood type, a different brain from their mother’s – otherwise a pregnant woman would have two heads; four arms; and, if her baby is a boy, two different genders at once!)

Until pro-choicers address this, they have no intellectual grounds to accept legalized abortion. Anything else would be avoiding the question (a big question).

Last of all, my dear new friend, whose company I truly enjoyed, I must remind you of what you said: that having an abortion “just because” is cruel. I asked you why, and you said, “Because it’s killing just because.” Sis, it is the same cruelty to kill an innocent baby for any reason.

You also said something I thought was powerful. When I asked you if a mother could kill her toddler who was conceived in rape, you said, “No, because the mother has other options.” What a profound and wise response! I would like to add that mothers have those same options while they are still pregnant. Why should the baby get the death penalty for the father’s crime?

The truth is, the right to life that an unborn baby conceived in rape has is the same right that a toddler conceived in rape has – and not because she can talk, like you mentioned, but because she is a human being! The only difference between them is that the toddler is older.

I would like to end this by saying that government does have the moral right to impose its morality on others – but only when government’s morality is correct (remember, we talked about how government imposes its morality on us when it tells us not to rape or molest children). How we determine if government’s morality is correct…well, I guess that’s what your paper is about!

My dear, I wrote this for you because I was inspired by your intelligence and passion, and because I enjoyed our meeting very much. Like I said before, we write so we can influence our world. But before we write, we must truly believe and understand what it is about the world that we are changing.

With much love and tenderness,

Ana Benderas

P.S. If you’re up for it, here is a video that shows what an abortion really is. I think it’s important to know this before we can formulate an opinion. (Strong images. Discretion advised.)

And here is an article that explains exactly what is done in the abortion process.

Wishing you luck and success in all the good you do!

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