We learned this week that doctors in China have performed some 336 million known abortions since 1971 when the government first attempted to limit the size of families. I say “known” abortions because this astronomical figure does not include so-called “missing” abortions, those surreptitiously conducted by couples on their own. The total exceeds the population of all but two nations of the world: China and India.
China’s hideous and heinous abortion record involves the infamous one-child policy instituted in 1979, required abortions, forced sterilizations, and other birth control procedures impressed upon women in violation of their human rights. Lest we be smug, note that the abortion tally in the United States now stands at more than 50 million since Roe v. Wade in 1973.
If you believe, as I do, that abortion of a human fetus takes the life of not simply animate tissue or protoplasm but a unique human person, than you must regard these numbers as stratospheric immorality. This systematic infanticide dwarfs other mass murders in history, e.g. 50-75 million by China’s Mao Ze Dong, 12 million estimated in the Holocaust, 8 million in the Congo, 6 million in the gulags by Stalin. The human tragedy in all these horrific figures is beyond comprehension. Each number within these statistics represents one human being, made in the image of God, loved by God, a person eternally valuable and significant.
Abortion of this magnitude cannot but negatively affect the cultures and societies that experience it, whether dictated to a people by autocratic regimes or embraced by a people with euphemisms like “choice” in the name of sexual freedom. So many abortions have been conducted in China that even a nation of 1.3 billion people (or 315 million in the US) is now aging at a pace that’s undermining economic growth and general wellbeing. In addition, China suffers an enormous “marriage problem” because hundreds of thousands of young men in their 20s and 30s cannot find sufficient numbers of young women to become their wives (in a culture that values male children, the “one-child” is often a boy). This in turn is contributing to higher rates of crime, homosexuality, and other social problems.
Abortion is a form of killing or murder. It always has been and no cloaked phrase can hide this fact. It is as illogical as it is irrational. This is evidenced regularly when entertainment stars, many who support so-called pro-choice, appear on late night talk shows to proclaim their pregnancy and talk about “the baby.” The only difference in their expected baby and another aborted fetus is the first is wanted by the parent(s) and the latter is not. This is supposedly the “choice” involved. But whether an adult calls an embryo a baby or a (apparently not-human) fetus doesn’t change its essence. It is what it is, a unique human person whose life should be protected in the name of all that’s moral, right, and good. Governments, cultures, or societies that ignore this truth do not escape unscathed. They pay a price we may yet not fully understand.
© Rex M. Rogers – All Rights Reserved, 2013
*This blog may be reproduced in whole or in part with a full attribution statement. Contact Rex or read more commentary on current issues
and events at www.rexmrogers.com or follow him at www.twitter.com/RexMRogers.