By Rev. Dr. George Muedeking
SENATOR TOM HARKIN (D-IA): "Abortion would not even be an issue if this entire committee were made up of women, because abortions happen to women."
SENATOR DANCOATES(R-IN): "And children!"
SENATOR HARKIN: "They happen to women."
SENATOR COATES: "And children and fetuses."
It is difficult to express more precisely what the issue of abortion means to the Pro-Life movement than this little exchange within the U.S. Senate Committee. In a single farcical half hour hearing on the "Freedom of Choice Act" (FOCA) on March 24ih, this Labor and Human Resources Committee highhandedly approved Senate Bill 25. How flippantly the deaths in the U.S. of one and a half* million unborn children a year (4100 per day, 3 per minute) can be disposed of!
How can this be so brazenly pursued? How can "wrongs become rights" so cavalierly? How can it be that 59.1% of Americans over 18 years of age, randomly sampled nationwide by Command Research said "yes" to the question, "Would you say you generally favor the right of a woman to decide if she needs or wants an abortion even if you personally oppose abortion?"
It is all done under the slogan of "Freedom of Choice." But whose choice? Not the innocent child in the womb, as Senator Coates tried to remind this railroading committee. Not even the choice of the same respondents to the Command Research poll cited above. When the issue is restated for them in the exact terms of the reality-question, 62.6% "agreed strongly" (another 10.6% "agreed somewhat") with the statement: "No matter howyou slice it, the fetus is a human baby. Killing is wrong, no matter what the month or stage of development"
This is what pro-lifers believe; it is what has supported them through the weary hours since the Supreme Court in Roe-Wade wiped out every legal protection previously granted 30 million innocent womb-dwellers who have lost their lives in the abortion holocaust.
That conviction puts us directly in frontof the Creator Himself, the giver and only disposer of life. We must answer to Him for our attitude towardhis supreme gift of life. And that is why the abortion problem will not go away, no matter how the politicians and the media frame their easy solutions. Too much is at stake when lif e is at stake.
Despite the sensitivity of 3/4ths of the American electorate, the present political leadership expects full support of the nation for FOCA. This actùif passed by the "representatives of the people" because pro-life defenders sit on their keyboards or fountain pens and do not let their legislators knowù will prohibit all popularly-supported state laws now regulating abortion (such as parental notification, being informed medically about abortion proceduresùinformed consent, and providing a waiting period for this elective surgery). Gone also will be theright for religious hospitals to refuse to abort and a doctor's duty to care for babies born alive during post-viability abortions as well as the right to speak out against abortion on demandùlong prison terms and huge fines for anyone who "interferes with" a woman wanting an abortion, as proposed in the Freedom of Access bills now sailing through Congress.
Bible-guided Christians should not be put off by the specious assertion that poor women should have the same "right" to destroy their offspring as do rich women. As Myrna Gutierrez reports in the Chicago Sun-Times (4/3/93), "While 70% of women with incomes of less than $25,000 disapprove of abortion, compared widi 52% of more affluent women, poorerwomenaccountfor two-thirds of abortions. As poor women fall prey to the deception that abortion is the quick fix to their problems, the wealthy cheer from the sidelines." And she adds, "Since abortion was legalized, feminization of poverty, child abuse, single parenting and sexual exploitation have skyrocketed. Millions of women now face die emotional and physical scars left by abortions, and women who have had abortions face a suicide risk nine times greater tiian that of those who haven't."
Even Planned Parenthood, the foremost purveyor of pre-birth deaths through abortion, concedes in its "Three Year Plan and Long Range Program Goals" that 9 out of 10 women who have abortions suffer some form of post abortion syndrome.
Yes, the issue is "rights." And those who have struggled for twenty years to return the "right to life" to the unborn, must continue to put the real issue before a media-mesmerized nation: "WHY CAN'T WE LOVE THEM BOTH?" Child and mother are both precious to God and will win his protection through the prayerful perseverance of the pro-life movement.