Over Memorial Day weekend, many of us, my family included, enjoyed a good old fashioned American bar be que. In our case it was brats and hamburgers — something simple. Maybe you had a pork steak, a nice New York strip steak or grilled chicken.
There is something about a holiday, especially Memorial Day weekend, that compels us to step outside and bar-be-que on an open grill. Of course it did not hurt that the weather over the weekend was perfect.
A couple of years ago Ethan and his wife Hillary were on a vegetarian diet. They were not strict vegetarians, or vegans. They changed their diet because it is healthier for you. Since then they have adjusted their diet to limit meat.
Strict vegans on the other hand abstain from the use of all animal products, particularly in diet, and an associated philosophy that rejects the commodity status of animals. Dietary vegans (also known as strict vegetarians) refrain from consuming animal products, not only meat but also eggs, dairy products and other animal-derived substances. They do this because animals are killed to produce food for us.
Although that is not my view on life, I respect a vegan’s philosophy and let them live their life they way they choose.
To me it’s odd how some of us in our society can protest the slaughter of animals for food yet they give no value to life in a mother’s womb. Is the life of a cow, or a wild deer more important than the life of a baby in the womb?
Last week Governor Mike Parson signed into law the strongest pro-life bill in Missouri history. It outlaws abortions after eight weeks — when the baby’s heart starts beating.
The law takes the logical conclusion that if death can be determined when a heart stops beating, then a beating heart should be an indication of life.
That is what the courts want to stay away from, a legal definition of when life begins because the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution declares that no state shall deprive any person of life, liberty or property without due process of law.
Missouri state House Democratic Minority Leader Crystal Quade said in a written statement the new law treats women “as little more than fetal incubators with no rights or role in the decision, even in cases of rape and incest.”
Actually the only time a woman has no input in the decision to have sex — and possibly become pregnant — is in the cases of rape and incest, which according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control is 1.5 percent of all abortions.
When asked about rape and incest Parson had this response: “Is it a terrible thing that happens in those situations? Yes it is. But the reality of it is bad things do happen sometimes. But you have two months to decide what you’re going to do with that issue, and I believe in two months you can make a decision.”
So women do have rights and a role to play in the decision of an unwanted pregnancy.
According to a 2004 survey of 1,209 post-abortive women by the Gutttmacher Institute, 92 percent of abortions were for reasons like: not ready for a child, can’t afford a baby, done having children,don’t want to be a single mother and would interfere with education or career.
I don’t believe any of those are good reasons to end what many of us consider to be a life.
In one of my classes in college we studied a primitive tribe in Africa. Because of poor hygiene and lack of medical care there was a high mortality rate for their children during the first couple of weeks after birth. So they would not give their child a name, and did not even consider them alive until one week after birth.
Now in this tribe it was very important to have a male heir. So if the first child was a little girl, the parents would simply set the baby outside their hut and let her die. This was acceptable to them because in their minds, the child was not alive.
Today, even with scientific evidence, those who are pro-abortion continually deny that the baby in the womb is a living human being.
In the last century the Nazis in Hitler’s Germany did not consider Jews to be human so they exterminated six million of them in one of the darkest chapters in world history.
For those of you who disagree with me I ask only one thing. Take a look at the abortion issue from the pro-life side. Walk a minute in our shoes. To us a fetus in a mother’s womb is a living human being. There is a lot of scientific evidence that points to that fact.
Prove to me that it is not alive and then I will consider switching sides and become pro-abortion.
