Friday, August 10, 2007

Slavery and Abortion

Yesterday, my husband and I toured the Civil War and Underground Railroad Museum in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. While looking at an exhibit on the harsh realities of slavery during that time in our nation's history, I read this 1856 quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson:

I do not see how a barbarous community and a civilized community can constitute one state. I think we must get rid of slavery, or we must get rid of freedom.

This reminded me again of something I have pondered recently - how so many debates regarding slavery in its day are exactly the same arguments used in the abortion debate today. The Boston Globe recently ran an article entitled "Shots assist in aborting fetuses" in which the author wrote:

In response to the Supreme Court decision upholding the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act, many abortion providers in Boston and around the country have adopted a defensive tactic. To avoid any chance of partially delivering a live
fetus, they are injecting fetuses with lethal drugs before procedures.

He later described those drugs as "either the heart drug digoxin or potassium chloride, a potentially poisonous salt also used in state executions." Both drugs will cause fetal cardiac arrest. However when used in state executions, potassium chloride is only administered AFTER the condemned person has been rendered unconscious by a previous injection so that he or she will not feel the pain.
What is wrong with a nation that will offer this respite to a murderer and not to the unborn child in the womb, for whom the pain is just as excruciating?

1 comment:

Deborah said...

In any and all political issues, it comes down to this for me. I try, actually, to not be too much known by my political associations. Politics will die away. Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today and forever, and if I must be polarizing, I wish to be polarizing on Christ alone. That being said, because of Who Jesus is as God and what God states as right and wrong in His Word, I CANNOT keep silent on the issue of life and essentially, my politics have simply boiled down to life. Republican, Democrat, Independent or Indecisive, if you support the protected lives of unborn children and the living women and men who have conceived them, then we can at least agree politically on that. I have sent thank you notes to people against whom I would normally be politically opposed thanking them on their stance of the right to life for humans. I'm just back from Florida and Sea Turtles' nests are protected, the unborn, non-"breathing", not-yet-viable turtles, protected by federal law and yet the precious children in the same category are legally approved for murdering. Thanks, my Steph, for continuing to keep such important topics at the forefront of discussion. I *do* think the connection between abortion and slavery is so ridiculously clear that it blows my mind that people don't see the right and the wrong of it to the point that their willing to DO something about it.

Love you...