The following is an excerpt from article DA375 by Hank Hanegraaff. The full article can be found by following the link below the excerpt.
Those who continue to fight legislation restricting abortion are in reality not “pro-choice.” Rather, they are singularly “pro-murder.” While the rhetoric has served to camouflage the carnage, abortion is really nothing more than the painful killing of an innocent human being.
What Is Abortion?- Painful
It is painful because the methods employed to kill a preborn child involve burning, smothering, dismembering, and crushing. Dr. James Dobson offers a terrifying description of one method of abortion called Dilation and Extraction (D & X):
Over two days the cervix is dilated. Then an ultrasound device and forceps are used to reach in and grab the baby’s feet. The little body is pulled downward until just the head remains in the cervix. Next the abortionist grasps the nape of the neck and cuts open the back of the skull with blunt scissors. A device called a cannula is then inserted into the wound and the brain material is sucked out. If kidneys or other organs are desired, they are removed while the child is still partially in the vagina. Initially at least, these surgical procedures are performed on a live baby who has not specifically been anesthetized (although the mother’s medication may reduce some of the pain).9
Abortion is also performed by a procedure called Dilation and Curettage (D & C), in which a tiny hoe is used to chop the baby’s body to pieces. The body is then scraped off the wall of the uterus and subsequently reassembled to ensure that no remaining parts have been left behind. Other methods include:
• Saline Solution — a salt solution is injected into the amniotic fluid, burning the skin off the baby who, after thrashing in the uterus for a number of hours, is reduced to a shriveled corpse;
• Suction — presently two-thirds of all abortions in the United States and Canada are carried out using a suction tube, which tears the child apart and deposit the pieces into a jar;
• Hysterotomy — similar to a Caesarean section, except it is designed for the express purpose of killing rather than saving the baby;
• Prostaglandin — the injection of a chemical into the uterine muscle, causing it to react violently, thus expelling the preborn child (the few children who survive decapitation resulting from the violent contractions are exterminated after delivery).
What is Abortion?- Killing
Abortion involves killing because the zygote, which fulfills the criteria needed to establish the existence of biological life (including metabolism, development, the ability to react to stimuli, and cell reproduction), is indeed terminated.
What is Abortion?- Innocent
While it is true that everyone is conceived and born in sin, preborn children are innocent because they have done nothing wrong. They deserve protection, not capital punishment.
What is Abortion?- Human Being
The living baby in the mother’s womb is a human being because he or she is the product of human parents and has a totally distinct human genetic code. This truth that abortion terminates the life of a human being is substantiated by science:
• As Dr. Micheline Matthews-Roth, a principal research associate at Harvard Medical School’s Department of Medicine, puts it, “It is scientifically correct to say that an individual human life begins at conception, when egg and sperm join to form the zygote, and this developing human always is a member of our species in all stages of its life.”10
• French geneticist Jerome L. LeJeune bore eloquent testimony to the truth of Dr. Matthews-Roth’s remarks when he gave the following testimony to a United States Senate sub-committee: “To accept the fact that after fertilization has taken place a new human has come into being is no longer a matter of taste or opinion. The human nature of the human being from conception to old age is not a metaphysical contention, it is plain experimental evidence.”11
• Perhaps Dr. Hymie Gordon, professor of medical genetics and a physician at the prestigious Mayo Clinic, best summarized the perspective of science when he said, “I think we can now also say that the question of the beginning of life — when life begins — is no longer a question for theological or philosophical dispute. It is an established scientific fact. Theologians and philosophers may go on to debate the meaning of life or purpose of life, but it is an established fact that all life, including human life, begins at the moment of conception.”12
Long before science substantiated the truth that abortion is the painful killing of an innocent human being, the psalmist summarized the view of sacred Scripture with these words:
For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well. My frame was not hidden from you when I was made in the secret place. When I was woven together in the depths of the earth, your eyes saw my unformed body. All the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be.
Psalm 139:13-16
