ABORTION AS DIVISIVE TO NATION AS SLAVERY

                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, January 17, 1993                   TAG: 9301150012
SECTION: CURRENT                    PAGE: NRV-2   EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium
ABORTION AS DIVISIVE TO NATION AS SLAVERY
One hundred thirty years ago, our nation was engaged in a devastating Civil War that threatened the republic our founding fathers had risked their lives and fortunes to create.
Today, the issue of abortion looms over our nation and threatens to be as divisive as slavery was then.
After that bloody conflict, most Americans from both the North and South asked themselves why the national moral compass had been inoperative for so long that the obvious immorality of slavery had not been recognized and rejected in this "land of the free."
The evil nature of slavery was dressed up and adorned to deceive the eyes of the beholder. It was couched in terms of protecting states' rights, responding pragmatically to economic realities and protecting property rights. This did not change the fact that slavery was ugly, disgusting and without moral justification.
Today, we have an obvious evil that costs the lives of 1.6 million Americans each year. Skilled wordsmiths help foster the belief in our rights-conscious society that the right to terminate a pregnancy is bound up with control of one's own body, personal privacy and equality of legal rights between men and women.
As important as these rights are, and should be, no right is absolute. To maintain that any right is absolute may be to ignore, at our national peril, the evil underlying such right.
Slavery produced cruel treatment of a defined group of human beings and depreciated the value of human life. Abortion goes beyond cruel treatment and effects the death of preborn humans. It is time for Americans to stand collectively for the rights and protection of those who cannot vote against their own annihilation.
It has been a characteristic of the American psyche to protect the weak and helpless. We need to strip the veneer and view abortion for what it really is - the immoral and unjustifiable slaughter of human beings.
We can never enjoy "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" until the protection of life in the womb is guaranteed.\ Glenwood Lookabill\ Draper

by Bhavesh Jinadra by CNB