Human rights in the abortion debate

Today is the 16th October, here in NZ, and it's Blog Action Day again...or BAD, which always strikes me as a kind of ironic acronym to be using. Anyway, the focus this year is on Human Rights, a subject that covers an extraordinary number of areas.

One that concerns me greatly is that of abortion. Yes, I know all the old arguments as to why women should have abortion on demand and so on, and that men shouldn't have any say on the matter because they don't have to carry babies in their wombs (even though the babies wouldn't have got there in the first place if it hadn't been for the men), and that it's a woman's right to choose and all the rest of it. The arguments for abortion on demand have been running around like headless chickens for decades now, and are sound very tired and very hollow.

Too often those arguing for abortion on demand come up with straw men arguments. One such is claiming that those who are pro-life are all religious people, people who want to impose their religious views on everyone else. This isn't the case at all. Yes, there are plenty of people of faith involved in the abortion debate, but the reason they're there is because it's a matter of ethics, and ethics are very close to the hearts of people of faith.

Pro-life arguments are also about human rights, and the rights of the little human beings who are being carried in the wombs of their mothers are never given any credence by those in favour of abortion. Somewhere along the line, these evolving babies were turned into 'foetuses', blobs of jelly, or growths. Anything but what they actually are: potential human beings.  If we were to take a new-born baby and kill it, we would be charged with infanticide; this has been the case for many centuries. But somehow a baby - a human being - inside the womb is regarded by the pro-abortion movement as not a human being, and certainly not one with any human rights. According to the long-held myth - "it's a woman's right to choose" - the potential human being has no rights. (Many women who argue "it's a woman's right to choose" don't realise that this myth was propagated by a man originally, not by a woman.)

I know most of this will be pooh-poohed by women (and men) who favour abortion.  However, I'd like to suggest you read further on these straw-men arguments.  Even more I'd like you to stop and think about the human rights implications of abortion.  Where else in the world do we allow thousands of people to be killed day after day, hour after hour, without a major outcry?  Nowhere. If a tribe or a nation kills hundreds of members of another tribe or nation there is an international tribunal set up to investigate, even if it takes a decade or more to do so.  But because the abortion movement has so successfully redefined human rights when it comes to humans inside the womb, there is no outcry, except from those who fight against this evil year in and year out.

It's truly time for the ethical, human rights issues in the abortion debate to be honestly defined.  For several decades people have believed lies about the benefits of abortion, or the rights of women and so on. Lies eventually lead to nations being destroyed from the inside out. Don't let that happen to your nation.