The Right to Life Is "Self-Evident"

By GREGORY J. RUMMO
JANUARY 28, 2002

NEXT TIME YOU VISIT a shopping mall or someplace where there are a lot of people take a moment to sit and observe. Count the number of children and young adults that walk by. Take a good look at their faces. Study their eyes.

Some will be talking and laughing with friends and family, others just window shopping or maybe walking alone and simply enjoying being out of the house on a grey afternoon in mid-winter.

Now stop and realize that for every child and young adult up to and including the age of 29 that is alive in America today, one baby has been destroyed in its mother’s womb.

Since 1973, the year when two Supreme Court decisions, Roe vs. Wade and Doe vs. Bolton legalized abortion in all 50 states, we have slaughtered over 40 million unborn babies.

That represents half of an entire generation of Americans and is more than six times the number of Jews that were murdered in concentration camps during World War II.

To comprehend a figure of such magnitude and its significance, consider that there are over 150 countries in the world with populations of 40 million people or less. And we’re talking about some pretty large countries; among them Poland, Argentina, and Canada.

Abortion is a holocaust. There is simply no other word to describe it.

 This year marks the 29^th anniversary of the legalization of abortion in America. From January 20-27, the pro-life community celebrated “Sanctity of Human Life Week,” during which time ministers and their congregations united and focused on the value of human life.

King David wrote many of the Psalms that appear in the Old Testament book of the same name. This is how he described a growing embryo in Psalm 139: “For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother's womb. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well. My frame was not hidden from you when I was made in the secret place. When I was woven together in the depths of the earth, your eyes saw my unformed body. All the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be.”

David wrote that God actually has an intricate plan for every person’s life before they are born. He knows what color hair they will have, what their name will be and where they will live. He knows where they will go to school and what each will choose as his profession in life and if that decision will lead to a successful career or end in failure.

Every developing baby is a person with a unique identity and a critical mission in life. For all we know, one of those babies killed in its mother’s womb during the last 29 years might have become a brilliant medical researcher and discovered the cure for Alzheimer’s disease or AIDS.   

America’s Founding Fathers, many of whom were men that held deep religious convictions, cherished all life—including the life of the unborn. They believed so strongly that God was the creator that they said so in writing in our Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

That The Creator has given all men the right to life was a “self-evident” truth. Like one plus one equals two—no one had to try and explain it or prove it to the men who authored and signed this document. 

In their zeal to declare independence from the English King George III, whose political tendrils reached out across an ocean, they echoed the truths of this Hebrew King David whose poetic message, describing the unalienable and self-evident right to life, thundered across the millennia.

Yet, neither King David nor the Founding Fathers had any of the modern medical equipment such as ultrasound that we possess today which proves empirically what they believed a priori.

When I recently explained to my younger son James what an abortion is, he innocently asked me if doctors who perform abortions go to jail. To a 10-year old, the sanctity of human life is a “self evident” truth.

 With all of our knowledge and technology in the 21rst century, we fail to see what a simple child knows to be true in his heart. The conclusion is obvious. Those who disagree that the sanctity of the life of the unborn is self-evident are willfully ignorant of the facts and living in denial of what they know to be true in their hearts. n

E-mail the author at GregoryJRummo@aol.com