Abortion

I hate this topic.

I hate the fact that Abortion procedures sometimes need to be done. I hate the fact that women are raped. I hate the fact that sometimes going through the birth process would kill the mother. And I hate the fact that we are having a political debate about such a sensitive and terrible subject. But what I hate keeps staring me in the face, and we have to deal with it.

Abortions are performed for lots of reasons, and every single one of them is a sad and terrible choice for the mother who is losing a child, a family that has to deal with the emotional fallout, and a society that has to deal with the legal battles. Every case is different and deserves it's own battle in the minds and hearts of the people directly involved. And when the choice is made in either direction, we should be there to support the woman so she can either prepare her life for a new child or deal with the result and get back to building the life that she chooses to lead.

Rapists deserve jail time. Lots of it. We don't want them in our society. But putting a future father in jail means that there will not be half the hands building the home that the child will be growing up in. If the health of society is more important, and I think in cases like this it is, then society must provide the resources that the father who is in jail cannot. Or, society must provide an 'out' for the woman who had no choice in the first place, and is trying to find a way to recover the life that she lost. Her own.

Doctors see death every day, even if they don't deal with it every day personally. Whether it is someone coming in who was recently diagnosed with cancer or a woman who is dealing with the terrible choice of ending a pregnancy, it is hard for our doctors to deal with. But the purpose that all doctors have is to preserve lives. Sometimes that means recognizing that a woman's life is something that can be saved while sacrificing another life. Those doctors try their best to leave the decisions up to the people whose lives are directly affected by them. And those doctors need our sympathy as much as the mother. Being hated for saving lives is the ultimate nightmare for any doctor. As a society, we must stop the hate.

Few, if any, of us are pro-abortion. It's a terrible thing. Killing another, at any stage of life, is something that we really need to think about. But we do kill. We kill our miners by not providing them with enough safety equipment. We kill ourselves by putting pollution into our atmosphere and water supply. We kill our enemies on the battlefield. We kill those who have killed others themselves. And we throw justifications everywhere to try and cover it up.

If we want to look at the big picture, if we want to really think globally about all of this, let me ask this question. How many more of us can we bring into the world before our environment is incapable of sustaining life? And by bringing child after child into a world with limited resources, are we not killing ourselves by not making plans to care for those children, and instead letting them deal with a harsh and cruel world without a strong foundation to stand on?

Abortion may be a terrible thing, and it is. But the alternatives are thousands of times worse.