Protecting the Innocent2 min read

The following essay was written by 8th grader Brandon R. from St. John Lutheran School in Rochester. It earned 1st place in the Lutherans for Life of Michigan Life Issues Contest, in the Elementary Essay Division. 

When people think of an unborn baby, sometimes people think of just a little blob of tissue in the mother’s womb, not the entire life that the baby will live, all the people that this life will affect, or all the emotions that this child will feel. That “little blob” could grow up to save lives, change the world, or invent the cure to cancer. God has a plan for that specific life. That “little blob” is alive.

When I was in my mom’s womb, my mom went on a dolphin excursion. The dolphins seemed very interested in my mom’s stomach, and when she asked why, the worker told her that the dolphins could hear two heartbeats and were curious. A heartbeat is an amazing thing. The heart, when it beats, sends blood throughout the body, and that blood keeps you alive. I was alive.

Everyone is alive before they are born. Psalm 139:13 says, “For you formed my inward parts; you knitted me together in my mother’s womb.” This is talking about how God created us in the womb, and how we were still alive then. Unborn babies are alive. In fact, some doctors will “abort” a baby at the end of pregnancy or as the child is being born, when that child is very much alive. We do not have the right to take away their life.

Some pregnant mothers claim that they have the right to have an abortion because it is “their body, their choice” but it is not their body. They are not killing themselves. There is an entirely different person inside of them and they do not have the right to take their life away. Exodus 20:13 says “You shall not murder,” and that is what abortion really is: it is the murder of an innocent child.

If somebody murders a pregnant woman, they are charged with two murders: the mom and the unborn child. If the unborn child is counted as being alive in some court cases, why is it not counted in abortion cases? Charging someone with two murders makes sense. In the one action of murder, two lives were taken, two stories ended, and two people died. Abortion being legal does not make sense. In both cases, murder happened, and people need to remember that, whether you can see them or not, a person is a person.

All in all, abortion, said plainly, is the murder of an innocent child and is not justified. It is our job to protect the innocent. It is not the mom’s body. It is the unborn child’s life.

 _{Photo (c) Paola Giannoni/iStock}