Why abortion should not be political at all

By ALEXIS BAKER

abortion moralityAbortion morality

As a black woman who stands on pro-life values here in America, I tend to be widely disagreed with by certain demographics. I appear to be accepted by conservatives for my unpopular stance on supporting life in the womb and frowned upon by liberals for being archaic or insensitive. However, I’ve noticed that the arena of politics tends to be where abortion morality is most widely discussed, and I am disqualified from being anything but Republican because of my conviction.

I’m not allowed to identify with anything else because abortion is on the Republican end of the American political spectrum, and there I must evidently stay. What does one do, then, if they possess no political affiliation but are still pro-life? Are they immediately resigned to seal themselves into one box or another? I propose that perhaps we’ve failed to realize this simple truth:

Abortion is not a political issue.

Though it has been politicized as a topic of discussion, the sanctity, validity, and value of life in the womb is inherently above politics because it is a subject of human rights. Human rights have to exist before political affiliations, no? How a nation’s budget will be spent is a political discussion; how and when a military force will be deployed is a political discussion; but we must first have a budget and a military in order to have the bipartisan banter about those details.

Where we became deluded in our approach to life in the womb is rather straightforward and grotesque: We have identified that the value of life in the womb, of babies, in America changes with which political party holds office in any given presidential term or congressional majority.

One party seems to be vastly accepting of babies being burned, dissected, starved and suctioned out of the womb while the other seems to be firmly against it. We legalized the extermination of the most vulnerable of our human race in heated, passionate arguments and forgot the subject matter of the legislation: actual people.

Been down this road before

But hasn’t this star-spangled nation been down this road before, the road of allowing politics to determine some people’s humanity?

We’re not too far removed from the days of slavery and how the games of presidential popularity and economic sustainability determining the humanity of darker-skinned people have been played by both political parties since the inception of this nation.

Have we forgotten how the very thread of humanity hung (and still hangs) in a balance of preference and political correctness in this country since the time of first contact with Native Indigenous Americans? Or have we chosen to believe ourselves to be more evolved, more removed from those wicked days of antiquity where we would not dare commit the same atrocities again?

How deceived we have become, America, for we have yet again allowed the discussion of bloodshed to be Red or Blue, Donkey or Elephant, blinded to the numbers of Americans dying in the name of aggressive self-actualization and social rights.

One nation under God?

As both a Christian and a birth worker in my local community, I can firmly acknowledge that the definition of being pro-life should far surpass abortion and continue into post-birth life for all people. Proverbs 31:8-9 for example instructs us to stand up for ALL people appointed to die.

When exactly in our “One Nation under God” did we divide the value of life along manmade partisan lines and do exactly the opposite of what Jesus commanded we do, to love our neighbors as ourselves? Are we really one nation under God if we have divided our convictions about the existence of humanity based on political preference and affiliation? I don’t think we’ve erred on the side of caution by sorting the lives of people into political categories, I think we’ve simply erred on the side of error.

Missed the mark

Gun control, border policies, education reform, these all have their place to be debated and decided to assess what strategy is best for the benefit of the American people. We have, however, greatly missed the mark to believe that the very lives of American people are subjects to be debated and decided.

If it is not already evident, I personally possess no political loyalty as there is rich meat and heavy bones on both sides of the big political see-saw here in the States. As a God-fearing woman, before anything I believe what God says about humanity, that He loved it so much that He was willing to die to save it.

All of it.

If Jesus was willing to die for them, that’s enough for me to speak for their defense, to be heartbroken at their demise. God once told the prophet Jeremiah (1:6) that …

“before He formed him in his mother’s womb, He knew him.”

We are already human to our Creator before we are born, we have heartbeats and lung function and our own blood types and hands and feet before we ever exit the womb. We are human beings before we are political. In truth we, at the core, don’t need to be Democrat or Republican to believe in the humanity of our little ones. It should simply be that we know it, we believe it, we fight for it because we are, Right or Left, human.

[Thanks to Alexis Baker for permission to publish this essay.  Mrs. Baker lives in Columbus, Ohio, and is starting to enter the world of blogging. Her motto about creative expression is “may everything I think, touch, and say glorify Christ in me”.]

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