What if it was your Brother?

 My little brother loves Star Wars. He is a basketball champion and a chess master. He always shares his presents and candy with everyone. He will spend all of his allowance money just so he can buy my mom flowers for Mother’s Day. He is 12 years old. His name is Sean. He is Korean. And because of abortion, he may have not existed.

 Abortion should be illegal in the United States because of the immorality of it, the opportunity of adoption, and the right that all Americans have to life. Now before I dive into my reasons why, I need to make something clear. When I am referring to abortion in this paper, I am excluding abortion in the case of rape, incest, and danger to the mother. I personally believe those are the exceptions. Everything else is murder. Here is why.

Now, back to my brother. My little brother Sean was adopted from South Korea when he was 5 months old. His mother placed him in foster care just days after he was born. Because it was a foreign adoption, my family does not know all of the details on why his birth mother decided to give him up. Despite this, we are forever grateful to her for putting my little brother up for adoption rather than have an abortion because it means I can have my little brother. Technically, abortion in South Korea is illegal but it is still common for women to do it themselves or have illegal procedures done.

 A lot of times people look at abortion just through the minds of the mothers and only concern themselves with the mother’s feelings. But what about all of the women who are unable to have their own children? What about the agony they have gone through while they have waited for that pregnancy test to turn positive? My older sister Natasha died a stillborn. She was full term and my mother had to deliver her as if she was alive. But she wasn’t. That brought my mother so much pain to hold her dead baby in her arms after a 9-month long period of excitement for her future family. It makes me sad that women still choose to willingly kill their babies when other women want to have one so desperately. There are thousands of willing couples who are looking to start their family but are physically unable to. Now, I understand that not all environments are ideal for bringing a baby into. For example, the mother might have to raise the child in poverty, without a father, or in a rough part of the world. Despite this, there are many families that are able to care for these children. Even if the children do not get adopted by the time they are 18 isn’t it better for them to have a life full of hope rather than no life at all?

I agree with most people that when you kill a person, it is murder. You are taking away their life and the potential that they could have fulfilled in the future. Murder is inherently wrong and I don’t think many people disagree with that statement. Now what if I said that since 1973, there have been over 50 million murders of innocent people. That is almost nine times the amount of Jews who died in the Holocaust. If we honored each of those people with a moment of silence, we would be silent for over 100 years. Ok now I know what you are thinking. You might jump back with the argument that these aborted babies are not human.  However, a human heart begins to beat just 18 days after it is conceived. If we pronounce someone dead at the time their heart stops beating, why don’t we pronounce them alive when it starts. When you kill a pregnant woman, you are committing a double homicide, so if the baby counts as living then, why doesn’t it count when the mother kills it? Now that we have established that the baby is living after 3 weeks into the pregnancy, there shouldn’t be any question whether abortion should be legal after 3 weeks. What about abortions before 3 weeks? Technically, yes, the baby is not alive yet. But, there is still the potential to create a whole new life. A whole person with their own dreams, fears, and goals. How could we take all of that away from someone?

Just because a child spent time in foster care does not mean they will have a life full of misery. There have been many famous figures who were adopted, including Bill Clinton, Steve Jobs, Babe Ruth, and Marilyn Monroe, just to name a few. Even President Clinton, a Democrat, said, “Perhaps there is no greater miracle than finding a loving home for a child who needs one.” There are about 135,000 children adopted in the United States every year. There are about 125,000 abortions in the United States every day. It should not be harder to save a baby then it is to kill one.

            Abortion goes against everything that America even stands for. In the Declaration of Independence, it states that we all have a right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. When these babies are aborted, we are taking away their right to life. In America, we always say that “we are born free, but when we kill these babies, we make it so they are not even free to be born”-Anonymous.

“ The mother does not get to choose whether or not her baby gets his/her rights. The mother had a choice-her choice to have sex. I guess you could say that we are all pro-choice. We had the choice to choose birth control or abstinence. Having the baby is the consequence, not the choice. When a person murders someone, they do not get to choose whether or not they go to jail. When a woman gets pregnant, she cannot choose if she wants to give birth to it. Sure it is the woman’s body and she can choose what she does with it, but the baby inside her is not her body. It has its own organs, thoughts, feelings, and DNA. After conception, it is no longer just the woman’s body, therefore she does not get to decide what to do with the baby at that point. The baby has their own set of rights that are clearly violated when they are killed. Ronald Reagan once said, “I’ve noticed that everyone who is for abortion has already been born”. These babies cannot fight for their lives and so we need to do it for them.

            What about if the baby is going to be severely disabled or basically a vegetable because they will not even have brain activity. Is abortion ok then? Still no. A person is a person even if they cannot respond to the world around them. Many people supporting abortion say that when a baby is born with no brain activity, they are technically not still a person but I disagree. To illustrate my point, I would like to share a story of a family from American Fork, Utah. Charity Yorgason was born without a brain. Yes you read that right. She was born with no cerebrum or cerebellum, just a brain stem at the base of her skull. Because the brain stem controls your autonomous nervous system, Charity was still able to breathe and her heart could still beat. However, because she had no brain, she could not see, hear, talk, have her own thoughts, or even feel touch. Many people questioned why the parents didn’t choose to abort her because she would have a life full of misery. However, I firmly believe that Charity was an angel sent straight from heaven. Whether you are a religious person or not, there is not a doubt that she taught this family about love, selflessness, and compassion. Maybe that was her real purpose on this Earth.  The family remarked that they knew that Charity had a spirit inside of her body. She could sense when something was going wrong in the house and she would react to different types of music. She would still smile and chuckle because those can be involuntary actions. Most babies with anacephaly (being born missing part or all of the brain) do not even live to be a day old. Charity, however, lived to be eight years old. Her story is proof that even someone without a brain is still human. They can still feel joy and teach others vital lessons. She proves that no life should go to waste and everyone has a purpose here, whether they can even realize it or not. This family she grew up with was not her blood related family but her adopted family. I realize that not all families are well equipped to take care of a baby with such extreme disabilities but my point is that there is a family out there that is willingly to take care of these disabled children.

            No life should end before it even starts. We should not murder babies in fear that they might one day be abused or mistreated. Every life matters and every person can make an imprint on the world. This is a miracle, not a burden. No baby should be killed because they are inconvenient or came at the wrong time. Mother Teresa once said, “We must not be surprised when we hear of murders, of killings, of wars, and of hatred. If a mother can kill her own child, what is left but for us to kill each other. A nation that kills its children in the womb has lost its soul.” I would love to keep talking about reasons why abortion should be illegal, but I need to go call my little brother.