Does it matter if abortion kills babies?

Indeed, a Planned Parenthood advertisement from 1964 (Planned Parenthood is now the largest abortion provider in the USA) stated: “An abortion kills the life of a baby after it has begun”.

Pro-choice advocate, Kathleen McDonnell wrote: “Abortion is in some sense an act of violence and indisputably results in the termination of a life”.

Penny Lane, creator of ‘The Abortion Diaries’ said: “I remember feeling conflicted about the magic of being pregnant. I felt electricity running through my body. Not for a minute did I not think of it as a life. I knew it was a baby”.

Australian pro-choice author Leslie Cannold wrote: “Any woman who has felt a baby stir inside her [and] any man who has seen the tiny heart pulsing on an ultrasound screen knows that abortion is about ending a life”.

Some pro-choicers and abortionists use even blunter language.

American feminist, Camille Paglia wrote: “Let’s take the issue of abortion rights, of which I am a firm supporter. I have always frankly admitted that abortion is murder, the extermination of the powerless by the powerful”.

Dr Robert Jones: “One has to start with the attitude that you accept the criticism that abortion is murder. . . You’re extinguishing life and if you don’t face up to that you are not being honest with yourself”.

Even the Queensland Criminal Code indirectly affirms that abortion destroys the life of a child. Section 313(2) Killing unborn child, states that an assault on a pregnant woman may result in the destruction of the life of the child before birth. (maximum penalty – life imprisonment). If such an assault can destroy the life of a child then, on those terms, the act of deliberate abortion must most certainly destroy the life of a child.

So, what is going on here? The killing of innocent human beings is usually regarded as being a very serious moral offence, if not the most serious of moral offences. And surely no human beings are more innocent than babies.

Yet, abortionists and pro-choicers (not just the people who are opposed to abortion) are prepared to say that abortion kills: in particular, we have this recent public admission by Dr Carol Portman that she herself kills babies. Few though of the 70 or so people who heard her say that that night seemed even to blink an eye at her remarkably candid statement. A media release, drawing explicit attention to what Dr Portman had said, was issued immediately after the event but that too did not arouse a response.

Is this a good thing, a sign of a maturing society, that we are prepared to face directly what abortion does to babies – kills them – and then just calmly go on with our lives? Move along, nothing to see here.

Or, is the acceptance of the deliberate destruction of young human lives a sign of a society in serious moral collapse?