Part one of a series

The state of Texas has recently passed a law that bans in-state abortions about six weeks into a pregnancy. It is just one of the many restrictive state-wide measures on abortions going into effect across the United States.

The Senate Bill 8, widely known as the Heartbeat Bill, prohibits a woman from receiving an abortion in Texas once cardiac activity can be detected in the womb. Normally, this is about six weeks into a pregnancy, when most women have not yet realized they are pregnant. 

The wording of the law makes it difficult to challenge in court, and the Supreme Court has already refused to block it. Private citizens are permitted to file a lawsuit against those they are convinced may have been involved in assisting a pregnant woman in getting an abortion, according to Elle.com.

“Our Creator endowed us with the right to life, and yet millions of children lose their right to life every year because of abortion. In Texas, we work to save those lives,” Texas governor Greg Abbott said as he signed the law into effect last May. “ That’s exactly what the Texas Legislature did this session.”

According to Abort 73, in 2019 roughly 57,275 abortions took place in Texas alone. In other words, 13.2% of Texas pregnancies were ended by abortion.

Since the Heartbeat Bill became law in September, thousands of demonstrators have marched at the Texas Capitol in Austin and in cities all over the state to protest the restrictions on abortion, citing the need for a woman to have access to essential healthcare.

But confronting the answer to whether abortion is morally and socially right takes courage. In the quest for truth, one must be willing to accept the possibility that the answer may not be something they like. Some have compared abortion to murder. According to Oxford Languages, murder is defined as “the unlawful premeditated killing of one human being by another.” It is true that the destruction of fetuses in the womb is protected by national laws in many parts of  the world, although it is inhumane. Some question how we consider murder to be such a crooked action, a sure sign of wickedness and barbarism and deserving of condemnation and punishment, but welcome the deliberate, unjust taking of a defenseless child’s life.

But to answer the question about whether abortion is right or wrong, whether we as a nation are actually endorsing murder, we must first ask the question, when does human life really begin? Is a fetus actually a living human child or just a bundle of tissue? Medically speaking, extensive biological research confirms that human life starts at conception. As stated by the American College of Pediatricians, when a mother’s egg and a father’s sperm come together to create a fertilized zygote, a genetically distinct and unique human being has emerged. In the DNA resides the instructions for the new human to grow and develop healthily. Therefore, a zygote hidden in a womb is no less human than the mother carrying it. 

Considering this truth, we as a society must be very careful. If we constantly create new definitions of humanity based on warped views of what is right or simply for convenience, the festering wound that is injustice will know no end. Essentially, isn’t the true difference between a fetus and you or I just age, dwelling place, and level of development?

So is abortion a legalized form of murder? Well, feticide is still a deliberate decision to end a human life and meets all the attributes of murder. It is only different from the full definition of murder because manmade laws protect the practice. But it would be flawed to argue that what is legal is always right.  Abortion is the decision to take another human’s life, and that will always be the definition of murder, regardless of what human laws say. Simply put, it is a legalized form of unjust killing–murder in disguise.

Part 1, to be continued