In America, nearly one in three pregnancies end in abortion, which means there are “over 1.21 million abortions carried out every year in the United States.” (Planned Parenthood carried out more than 320,000 in 2010 alone.)
At rates this high, if abortion were a disease, doctors would label it a pandemic. If it were a war, historians would call it genocide. And if proponents of death like Planned Parenthood were honest, they would call it what it really is—a post-conception contraceptive that kills a preborn child.
These hard numbers notwithstanding, many people still find ways to distract themselves from the truth when it comes to abortion. And often, they do this by rationalizing that the aborted child is still too undeveloped to feel pain or to be truly human.
The ethical slippery slope of such thinking aside, it’s worth noting that, although 90 percent of all abortions happen prior to the 12th week of gestation, by that time the aborted child is able to “open and close her hands, suck her thumb, and [actively react] to outside activity.”
Moreover, she has “vital organs, such as kidneys, intestines, brain and liver in place and functioning.”
And, of course, she has a heart that stops beating once the abortion has been performed.
These are uncomfortable facts, but they are true nonetheless.
Here’s the bottom line: proponents of death can call the baby a “fetus” or “blob of tissue” or a “mass of cells” or whatever they must call it to keep their consciences from gnawing at them at night, but the reality is that the baby is actually what a baby always is—just a little human: A human that needs extra care and protection because of her size and tender age, but a human nonetheless.
To date, purveyors of the culture of death have been able to establish and maintain what the late Chuck Colson referred to as a “spiral of silence” concerning the truth about abortion and the babies that are aborted.
This spiral has actually propagated half-truths and ignorance concerning the children who meet their demise at the hands of Planned Parenthood scalpels, vacuum devices, and lethal injections. In short, it keeps people in the dark so that they never think about what really happens behind the closed doors of an abortion clinic.
It’s time to break that silence so that little girls sucking their thumbs in their mother’s wombs can be safe again—so that little boys opening and closing their hands as they rest inside their mother’s womb can feel secure once more.
We can begin to accomplish this by reminding mothers that they’re carrying babies, not a blob of tissue, and humans, not just a mass of cells.