NRL News
Page 7
June 2010
Volume 37
Issue 6

National Right to Life Pro-Life Essay Contest Winners

When They Say “A Woman’s Right to Choose” …

Editor’s note: The following essay was written for the National Right to Life Pro-Life Essay Contest. Maureen M. Mead of Blasdell, New York, won first place at the senior level—grades 10-12.

What is a right? Miriam-Webster Dictionary says that a right is “a power or privilege to which one is justly entitled.” Our founding fathers thought that every human being has unalienable rights, and one of these is the right to life. How then does our country justify abortion? Those in support of abortion will say that it is acceptable because of a woman’s right to choose. They say that it is the woman’s body, and thus she has the right to choose what to do with it, even if that means abortion.

People who use the phrase “a woman’s right to choose,” coined by pro-abortionists as a marketing technique and never meant to be a legitimate argument, are forgetting one important thing. Just because it is in your power to make a choice, that does not make the choice right. I can choose to walk down the street and shoot someone, but that does not mean that there should be a law allowing me to do so. A choice is always just a choice, it is not the outcome.

Yes, we have many choices to make, but just because we can choose to end another person’s life does not ever justify doing so. Yet there are those who argue, “Who are you to tell me what to do with my body?” The truth is, this does not just involve the woman’s body anymore. The baby in the womb is not simply an attachment or growth, but a new person, with rights to its body. This is not a potential for human life—this is a human being. As a human being, although small and hidden from view, this unborn child has just as much right to its body as the next person. We would not suggest that a mother could kill her three year old because her child is not big enough to have rights yet, but we deprive a infant in the womb its right to be born simply because it is so small.

Furthermore, if I saw a woman about to do something to her body that could severely harm her, I, and the average person with a conscience, would do everything to try and prevent her from doing it. Abortion is extremely harmful to women both physically and psychologically, and yet the world stands by silently and lets it happen.

Everyone deserves the right to grow up, laugh, make mistakes, and live their life fully. No one deserves to have their life brutally ripped from them. Abortion is the greatest act of cowardice, because it preys on those who cannot defend themselves. We have the right to make choices, but what are we choosing? We have an obligation to protect the weak and the innocent. There will never be a day when it is justifiable to take another person’s right to live simply because we can.

Soul or Cell

Editor’s note: The following essay was written for the National Right to Life Pro-Life Essay Contest. Anna Maria Divozzo of Ada, Michigan, won first place at the junior level—grades 7-9.

“I call Heaven and earth to witness this day,
That I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing:
Choose therefore Life”
(Deut. 30:19)

Women are sanctuaries of human life. We bear the most amazing privilege of having life formed within our bodies.

What a glorious gift from God, what a wonderful sanctity He has bestowed upon women. Women have the great responsibility, that most wonderful privilege, of bringing life into the world.

Pro-abortionists argue that the fetus is not yet a human life. But this has been scientifically proven to be wrong. Doctors are not just blotting out a live cell when they perform an abortion, they are quenching the fire of a new life and they know it.

Women know this too. As soon as she can feel the movement of human life within her, she knows. And how could she not know? Life within life; it is most wonderful. There must surely be a bond between the woman and the tiny human life she carries within her for nine long months—a bond that blooms into a mother’s love for her child, if only it were given the chance.

And after that, after sustaining this baby’s life with her own, she heartlessly and for her own convenience, snuffs out that life that had barely begun without every giving it a chance.

Our very own Declaration of Independence states that: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness ...”

There, our very own Declaration of Independence states that every human being has the right to life. And now that it is a scientific fact that the fetus is a human being, that means that he too has the right to Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. So perfect is the argument that it almost seems that our fore-fathers wrote it in defense of the unborn.

Abortion may or may not be against the Constitution, but it is against the American spirit. With the knowledge that an unborn child is, without a doubt, a human being, we cruelly deny him the rights that Americans have fought and died for for the past two centuries. We fought a war for our freedom, we fought a war for the freedom of slaves, wars for the freedom of other countries. Freedom is our cornerstone, freedom is America in a nutshell, freedom and the unalienable rights of man Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

“All men are created equal,” all men, born or unborn. We must protect the rights that the unborn deserve, the rights that can’t be denied them. We must give them the chance to become good American citizens who may become great people and do great things for their country. And it all starts with that little decision of letting them live.