When I was a junior in highschool, I got into a heated argument with my best friend about abortion. I wasn’t a Christian at the time. I was, however, strongly pro-life, yet not very informed about the issue. I just knew that killing was wrong, violence against another person was wrong, and a child is the most vulnerable being there is.

And I felt very strongly about it. Of course, she couldn’t have known at the time that I was pregnant. I hadn’t told anyone yet.

My boyfriend was trying to convince me to abort. He was going to a very prestigious art school in a few months and was visualizing his whole life crash down around him. I was only a junior, how did I expect to graduate and take good care of an infant at the same time? And after graduation- then what? Did I expect to continue on and go to college?

My friend threw a tough argument up in my face. What if the girl was the victim of rape? What if her father was also the father of her baby? What if she was just a child, too young to care for herself, much less someone else?

There are several problems with these arguments. Strictly focusing on the perspective of the mother, however, the first issue is that in every situation, abortion will only make things worse. Now, in addition to having been raped, you have the added knowledge that you killed a child. Now, in addition to being abused every other night by your drunk father, you get driven to an abortion clinic where the evidence is quietly removed. The staff unknowingly enables your Dad to continue doing what he’s been doing. Now, in addition to being thirteen years old and having sex way too early, the child you are carrying is killed. You are free to go on having as much sex as you like, and no one is the wiser.

Of course it’s not supposed to be that way. There are laws in place, and abortion clinics are required to make a report to the authorities any time an under-age girl comes in for an abortion. Especially if they know that the father of the child is an adult. But this is the real world, not planet Boinga-boinga. In the real world abortion clinics are only interested in getting the girl in the door, getting the 200 bucks out of her fist and into their pockets. How and why she got there is not their problem.

The argument my friend had was based on some of her own fears and uncertainties. She could not imagine herself as 13 years old and pregnant. She couldn’t imagine herself as 16 and pregnant. These doubts about a girl’s ability to cope in that situation lead her to the conclusion that aborting the baby would be the best choice. Planned Parenthood and abortion advocates prey on these fears and do their durn’dest to emphasize them.

When we focus on the fears, the uncertainty of our own lives, it is easy to ignore how our actions will effect other people. Being killed moments before birth is a pretty big consequence for another person’s action.

Since that first debate about abortion I’ve heard variations of the same argument thrown out over and over again. Without a doubt, those three situations create vast amounts of sympathy for anyone who considers them. I’ve even heard pro-lifers say that they are adamentally against abortion, except in the cases of rape, incest, or if the girl is way too young. Think about that argument a moment. What we are basically saying is that killing a child is absolutely wrong… under most conditions. Sometimes it’s ok, though. Like when we can imagine ourselves in that situation and know that we would desperately want to get out of it. Then it’s ok to kill a person.