Abortion’s damage to America
Americans consider the United States a nation founded on rights and freedom. In some cases, that foundation becomes a sinkhole that swallows everything built on it. Nowhere is this more clearly shown than in the issue of abortion.
The freedom to get and perform an abortion has first and foremost swallowed up medicine. Medicine, of course, is dedicated to saving lives instead of taking them. However, abortion does the opposite. As Keith Moore and TVN Pernaud note in “The Developing Human: Clinically Oriented Embryology,” “human development begins at fertilization when a… sperm unites with an… ovum to form a single cell – a zygote.” If human development begins at this point, then any abortion procedure takes the life of a human being. Yet organizations like the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and the American Medical Association deliberately ignore the science they claim their discipline is based on to maintain support for abortion and the discipline of medicine becomes untrustworthy.
Another area that abortion has critically harmed is politics and, with it, freedom itself. It is noteworthy that the United States shares the liberality of its abortion laws with freedom-restricting regimes like North Korea and China. In addition, freedom of thought in political parties has been damaged by abortion; in 1972, Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern had a pro-life running mate. President Joe Biden, as a senator in 1982, voted in committee for the Hatch amendment, which would have overruled Roe v. Wade. Due to pro-abortion positions in his own party, he has reversed course. The judiciary has equally suffered; both Antonin Scalia and Ruth Bader Ginsburg were nominated to the Supreme Court nearunanimously. But, ever since Robert Bork, judicial nominations have become, to quote commentator Tom Goldstein, “scorched-earth ideological wars.”
There is, however, a solution to ignorance of science, ideological conflict and the exclusion of dissent from political parties. Evidence must be followed where it leads — like the scientific evidence that life begins at conception — and politicians must realize that the freedom to do what we want is not worth dividing the country. Yet the evidence has not been followed where it leads and the ideological gap has widened. A gap can only widen so far before it becomes a complete separation. If we don’t want the country torn apart, abortion must be rejected.