The US Supreme Court began hearing verbal arguments in the case of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization on Wednesday, Dec. 1. The case could overturn the preceding decision in Roe v. Wade, which guarantees that access to abortion without excessive restriction, is every woman’s right. The case is under national watch by Americans on both sides of the coin and has resurfaced the age-old argument over abortion and its morality.
Abortion, plain and simple, should not be a human right because no one, whether man or woman, should get to choose to end someone’s life merely because they are inconvenient.
The issue of abortion is no debate over women’s rights or whether they should have them but instead is a moral issue regarding the value of human life in the womb. Science has backed time and time again the notion that an unborn child is a human life. 96 percent of biologists agree with this and it is a well-known fact that conception forms a new being with a unique set of human DNA. What else could the byproduct of human conception be?
A lot of people then try to argue that a fetus is human life, but not a valuable human life, and abortion is therefore justifiable. I have a problem with this. There is no suitable line that can be logically drawn to determine when life becomes valuable aside from conception itself.
Assuming that the statement “Babies are valuable human beings” is factual, (which it is in America, as killing babies is most obviously illegal) there is no line to draw. It is foolish to me to believe that the birth canal magically confers any sort of personhood or worth. It is not defensible to argue that a being inside the womb or birth canal has no value, but hours or even minutes later that same being is valuable because they are outside the womb. Geographic location doesn’t determine value, and if the baby is valuable during the period before he or she is born, then abortion is obviously wrong.
Most people are against late-term abortion and argue that abortion becomes wrong after a specific trimester or milestone of pregnancy, but the same principle applies. If the baby is valuable one day, who is to say it wasn’t the same exact baby the day before. There is no clear specific moment that can be pinpointed when a fetus would magically be granted value.
Conception is the clearest line and the easiest to defend because one moment there is no human with unique DNA, and the next there is.
If we can establish that a human is valuable from conception, we can establish that there is absolute truth regarding the reality of abortion. If the fetus is an innocent, valuable human life, and it is wrong to end innocent, valuable human life, then it is defensible to say that abortion is never morally acceptable.
Regardless of how the baby was conceived, regardless of the baby’s level of physical ability, and regardless of whether or not the baby was wanted, each child deserves a chance at life. It is unacceptable to get rid of innocent life at one’s convenience and I believe that a woman should have no right to get an abortion.
It is not up to men, women, or any human being to decide when to end an innocent life. The choice is not theirs to make.
