by Perry McCarney

Created on: April 05, 2011   Last Updated: August 07, 2011

Abortion has been a fact of life for thousands of years. Sometimes successfully, but many times resulting in the death of the expectant woman as well. Particularly in the many societies where it was not legitimately allowed through the societal domination of men, and therefore needed to be done in secret.

In some of those and other societies, when the pregnancy was carried through and the woman bore the pains of childbirth, if the new born was female, infanticide was practiced. If the patriarch of the family/clan felt that another female was unsupportable or undesired. Male newborns were only likely to be killed or left out to die on a mountainside if they had visible deformities.

We no longer live in such times, at least in the developed nations of the world. Pro-abortionists in today's world proclaim the right of a pregnant woman to control over her body and what it does. I totally agree that everyone, whether woman or man should have the right to determine for themselves what they can do to and with their bodies. 

But what relevance does this have to the question of abortion? Abortion is not about a woman's control over her body. Abortion is about whether it is socially acceptable for a pregnant woman to murder the new human being who, out of necessity, is currently residing within her body.

Abortions using modern medical procedures can be carried out without any risk to the pregnant woman as long as they are done early enough. Enabling her to resume her previous life as though nothing had occurred from a physical and physiological perspective, but rarely from a psychological one.

For a woman to decide to kill her unborn child, even if that child was conceived through rape, is not an easy or simple decision to make. Even in such a circumstance, the child is still an innocent. Personally, I feel the rapist father should at the least be castrated, so he can never do the same again. And I do not mean chemically castrated.

But whatever the circumstances of conception, does the innocent child merit execution. Every single human being: infant, child and adult, living today or having lived in the past, including the pregnant woman, passed through the state of human development that the unborn child threatened with death by abortion is currently in. At one time we were all there and in that undefended state of existence.

The big question in this debate is "When does human life start?" A seemingly common perception is that a human's life  starts at birth,

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