I would like to talk about a very important issue that affects every one of us... if your parents had exercised their so-called "choice," you would not be here today listening to me speak... also, I bet that if each of you could go back in time and choose whether or not to have ever been born, no matter how bad your life may seem now, you would choose life...

so why don't we give everybody their right to live?... more than 1.5 million babies each year in the United States alone will never have the chance to live as you and I so miraculously had the chance to do... today, one of every three pregnancies in this country ends in abortion...

today, I will go over five main points and a few quotations on the abortion issue...

first, let's look at societies where the sanctity of human life is not held in high esteem... they invariably become cruel and evil... take Idi Amin's Uganda, where food sent for starving people was confiscated by the government and Idi Amin himself practiced cannibalism... take current-day China, where female infants are routinely killed... under population control laws where only one child is permitted, a boy who can perform manual labor is considered of more value than a girl... and take Hitler's Germany, where people of so-called "inferior races" were exterminated... 6 million Jews were exterminated... in the last 23 years, since Roe v. Wade, more than 30 million innocent babies have been exterminated... how can you say that one of these is worse than the other?...

this disregard for the sanctity of human life leads into my second point - where life begins...

pro-abortionists argue about when life begins... when the sperm and egg unite, unless fate or a human hand kills the fetus, it is and will be a human being exactly like you or me... pro-abortionists say that a fetus isn't a baby because it couldn't live outside the mother's womb... but I ask you this... what fetus must live outside its mother's womb to survive?... what mother would expect her child to survive outside her womb before its time?...
if the abortionist argument is true, then if an auto accident makes you a quadriplegic who can't survive without constant care, should your mother or wife have the right to kill you?...
how could a beautiful child six months old have been less of a human being a year earlier?... I'm 20 years old as I stand before you... if I was still 19, would I be less of a human being, less entitled to life?... what about you?... were you less of a human being before you were born?... do you think it would be right for someone to consider that the rest of your life is irrelevant or meaningless just because it is "potential" and hasn't yet happened?... would killing you now, given that sort of reasoning, be any worse than aborting a baby?...

my third point is that the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence also have something to say about the right of all to live... there are many places in the Constitution indicating that none shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property, in that order, without due process of law... also, the Declaration of Independence reads "that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness"... notice that Life is always listed first... there is no greater right in our system of law than the right to life...
the Roe v. Wade decision back in 1973 was based on the woman's right to privacy... the pro-abortion side argued that in the 14th amendment, the states had no right to invade a woman's right to privacy concerning abortion... this narrow reading of the 14th Amendment ignores the larger issue of the right to life... hasn't murder always been illegal in this country?... hasn't the taking of someone's life always been more important than the violation of a person's privacy?... but is the right to life not more important than the right to privacy?... if someone invaded your privacy somehow, for example, by breaking into your house and reading your personal papers, would you have a right to take their life?...

the fourth point I have to make involves a study done by Barbara Syska, Dr. Thomas Hilgers, and Dennis O'Hare, in which there were a mean of only 98,000 abortions per year before 1967... this is a small fraction of the 1.5 million performed every year today... abortion has become an easy way to "eliminate" the inconvenient consequences of carelessness or bad decisions... some argue for abortion in cases of rape and incest and for the life of the mother... according to a survey by the Guttmacher Institute and Planned Parenthood, two pro-abortion institutions, which asked 1900 women at 27 abortion clinics and three hospitals why they made the decision to have an abortion, rape and incest was in only 1% of the cases and the threat to life or health of the mother was in only 3% of the cases... a deformed baby was involved in only 3% of the cases also... so, 93% of all the abortions performed in this study were because the mother had some sort of social problem, including: can't afford baby now, unready for responsibility, concerned about how having a baby could change her life, has problems with relationship or wants to avoid single parenthood, is not mature enough, or has all the children she wanted... as you can see, these are pretty casual reasons for the slaying of an unborn child (not the kind of life and death situations used to justify legalization of abortion)... also, in the cases of rape and incest, most women are ashamed they had an abortion afterwards because it wasn't the baby's fault in the first place...

my fifth and final point involves a survey of 252 women in 42 states done by David Reardon of Women Exploited by Abortion...
when asked if they thought their decision was well thought out, 74% responded not at all and when asked if they felt they had all of the necessary information to make the decision, 88% said not at all...
when asked whether they would ever have another abortion again, 95% said never...
94% of all surveyed said they experienced some negative psychological effects because of the abortion...
when asked what their opinion was of the fetus before the abortion, 26% had answered human, but when asked what their opinion was of the fetus some time after the abortion, 97% answered human...
98% would not encourage a friend to have an abortion in the same situation as theirs...
60% said their life today is worse because of their decision...
and 65% didn't feel in control of their lives when they made their decision...

the recent Republican presidential primaries allowed us to hear some eloquent defenders of the unborn... here's a quote from Bob Dornan, Congressman from California: "It is a baby, not a choice... if you leave it alone and don't stop its heart and flatline its brainwaves, if you don't kill it, you can call it potential all you want, it is a human being... Roe-Wade has given us 22 years of abortion on demand for any and all reasons or no reason at all through all 9 months"...
this quote is from Alan Keyes, Christian talk-show host: "[The] notion that your children exist for your convenience, for you pleasure, for your satisfaction, and, that if they don't serve that pleasure, satisfaction, and convenience, you have the right to get them out of the way - that is the principle of abortion... and so we see that at the heart of this issue is an attitude that poisons and destroys the entire possibility of family life... it establishes as the principle of right in this society the notion that other human beings, including those who are closest to us of any human beings in the world, can be regarded by us as objects, de-humanized instruments of our pleasure and passion and convenience"...
and Alan Keyes again: "People shall never again be enslaved by the principle that one human being, whether it be a mother or a slave owner, has the right to treat another human life as property"...

in conclusion, abortion is so controversial that so many people are afraid to speak their mind or take a stand... I've heard many say that they would never have an abortion, but that it wasn't right to take away the woman's right to choose... if it's wrong for one, then it's wrong for all... who will speak for unborn babies if you and I know the truth but won't speak out?...

Family Planning Perspectives. July/August 1988, p. 170. *Internet* http://www.infinet.com:80/~life/stats/whyabort.htm

Beckwith, Francis J. "Answering the Arguments for Abortion Rights," in Christian Research Journal. *Internet* http://www.iclnet.org/pub/resources/text/cri/cri-jrnl/crj0038a.txt

Barbara J. Syska, Thomas W. Hilgers, M.D., and Dennis O'Hare. "An Objective Model for Estimating Criminal Abortions and Its Implications for Public Policy," in New Perspectives on Human Abortion (Frederick, MD: University Publications of America, 1981), 78.

"Speech by Alan Keyes - February 19, 1995" from Focus on the Family radio show. The Right Side of the Web. *Internet* http://www.clark.net/pub/jeffd/index.html

"Alan Keyes Addresses Various Issues" Alan Keyes for President 1996. *Internet* http://sandh.com/keyes/issues.html