Abortion is 'America's holocaust'

Abortion advocates have missed the mark once again. This month my pro-choice peers have had several reasons to thank the "reproductive rights movement." Planned Parenthood's 90th anniversary has garnered an unwarranted amount of media attention. Twenty-five states have taken measures to make the Plan B "morning-after pill" more easily accessible. The possibility that the upcoming elections may give pro-abortion politicians control of Congress looms just over the horizon. They ought to be thanking another group - their mothers - for an altogether more important occurrence: their own birth. At least one-fifth of our generation has died in the American holocaust of legal abortion. Our generation, commonly labeled "Generation Y," is generally believed to span several decades. Beginning in the late 1970s and ending with the year 2000, "Generation Y" is the first generation whose members were all born after Roe v. Wade in 1973. We are all therefore survivors of the abortion holocaust that began that year and continues today. Our mothers could have chosen to abort us. Thankfully, they chose not to. At least one-fifth of our generation was not so fortunate. One-fifth may sound like an exaggerated amount, but research done by the Alan Guttmacher Institute points to its validity. AGI is a nonprofit research center that has been closely affiliated with the Planned Parenthood Federation of America since its creation. Originally a part of PPFA, AGI was envisioned by and named in honor of Alan F. Guttmacher, who was president of PPFA for more than a decade. AGI's 13th periodic survey of abortion providers, "Abortion Incidence and Services in the United States in 2000," begins with the following statement: "more than one-fifth of all pregnancies in the United States end in abortion." How many deaths does that fraction represent? A May 2006 article on the AGI Web site, www.guttmacher.org, reports that from 1973 through 2002 there were more than 42 million legal abortions in the United States. Since those years lie outside the commonly accepted timeframe for "Generation Y," we need a figure that's more specific to our particular generation, one that totals abortions reported from 1976-2000, for instance. Lucky for us, AGI provides such a statistic. The AGI publication "Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health" dated January-February 2003 gives yearly totals of reported abortions. Since the totals do not include abortions that weren't reported, they must be seen as conservative projections of the total number of abortions performed during the years listed. The annual totals from 1976-2000, during which the members of "Generation Y" were born, add up to approximately 35 million. The U.S. Census Bureau's Census 2000 reports that the under-25 demographic totaled approximately 99 million that year. Thus approximately 99 million Americans who were born during or after 1976 were alive in 2000. If 35 million members of our generation were aborted and 99 million were still alive in 2000, then our generation was originally comprised of at least 134 million people. The 35 million deaths from abortion represent approximately 26 percent, or slightly more than one-fourth of that total. A more recent statistic suggests that one-fourth could indeed be a better estimate of the number of members of our generation killed by abortion. An AGI article from May 2006 reports: "Twenty-four percent of all pregnancies (excluding miscarriages) end in abortion." Regardless, between one-fifth and one-fourth of our generation was wiped out before birth thanks to abortion providers and their supporters. Had these individuals not been aborted, they could have become classmates, friends, girlfriends or boyfriends, colleagues or spouses. Abortion murdered these individuals. It kills thousands more every day. Our mothers could have aborted us, but they chose not to, and we ought to be thankful. If you advocate abortion, you must be willing to admit that your mother had the right to "terminate" your life should she have chosen to do so. You must be willing to admit that your mother had the right to take a drug to expel your tiny body from her womb or to ask an abortionist to poison you, dismember you or by some other device end your life before you were born. You're free of course to stand with the nihilists and cynics to say your mother could have aborted you, but it doesn't matter. You're free to cite reasons why "abortion should be legal but rare," such as pregnancies resulting from rape or incest or pregnancies which endanger the life of the mother. On the other hand, you might acknowledge that abortion always means ending the life of a child in the womb and is therefore neither acceptable nor justifiable. This is why abortion is especially tragic for us: at least one-fifth of our generation was denied the right to life thanks to the "safe and legal medical procedure" of abortion. We have no way of knowing what those killed in the womb could have contributed to society. What if abortion murdered someone who could have discovered the cure for AIDS? Or the next great saint of our times, the next John Paul II or Mother Teresa? Or a future president of the United States? Abortion has sent millions of our generation to an untimely death. Should your mother or mine have chosen to "terminate" us, we would be victims not survivors of the American holocaust.

----- Contact Emily Byers at ebyers@lsureveille.com

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