The headline on Rebecca Luckett’s tragic USA Today column smacks strongly of irony.
An OB-GYN who claims to be Catholic, Luckett defended abortion on demand under the headline: “This is not politics or religion. It’s life.”
The headline is absolutely correct. The value of an unborn baby’s life should not have anything to do with politics or religion. Science long ago confirmed that an unborn baby is a unique, living human being from the moment of conception; and international human rights laws are supposed to protect human beings indiscriminately.
But Luckett fails to see it.
Luckett, who practices medicine in Botswana, had several heartbreaking experiences that no one ever would want to go through, one of which was learning that her second unborn baby had a fatal condition.
“Last August, I went for my 20-week ultrasound, expecting to find out if number two was a boy or a girl,” she wrote. “Instead, I looked to the monitor and found a fetus struggling to survive in my womb. I’m used to being on the other side of that ultrasound probe, so I knew what was next. I would have said the same thing: ‘The baby can’t survive. And you can get very sick.’”
Heartbroken, she chose abortion.
Now, pro-life advocates accept that there are rare, life-threatening circumstances when doctors cannot save both the mother and her unborn child. Tragically, sometimes only one life can be saved. But the intention in such cases is to save as many lives as possible, not kill, as is the intention of abortions. Perhaps this was the case with Luckett and her unborn baby.
However, Luckett used her tragic circumstances to advocate for abortion on demand.
She used another tragic example to attempt to justify the legalized killing of unborn babies. In Botswana, Luckett said she tried and failed to save a young woman from bleeding to death from a botched, at-home abortion.
As horrifying as the experience must have been, Luckett’s solution is not to provide better support to pregnant and parenting moms but to push for more deaths in the form of legalized abortion on demand.
She wrote:
But what the data show, and what my own experience has demonstrated, is that the illegality of abortion does not decrease either the likelihood that women will seek an abortion, or that someone will provide an abortion.
… But if we would recognize women’s right to self-determination, they and their families would become stronger. Women make the best decisions when they can make them for themselves and their families. Could we, not in spite of, but rather because of our moral convictions, focus our energy on uplifting women, making them stronger and breaking the structural violence that keeps them from controlling their own lives?
“Choice” and “self-determination” sound better than what an abortion actually is – the intentional killing of a unique, living unborn baby. And though abortionists claim legalized abortion merely makes abortions safer for women seeking them, there is very little evidence of this.
Women and their unborn babies both are valuable, unique individual human beings who deserve the same rights, protections and support. Abortion activists would give rights just to the mother, while pro-life advocates work hard to ensure that both individuals are treated with the dignity and worth that they deserve.
