Ryan T. Anderson - Tearing Us Apart: How Abortion Harms Everything and Solves Nothing

Ryan T. Anderson; Alexandra DeSanctis

Tearing Us Apart

How Abortion Harms Everything and Solves Nothing

For my children, my greatest joy

Ryan T. Anderson

For my parents, who gave me the gift of life

Alexandra DeSanctis

O n June 23, 1984, abortionist Dr. Anthony Levatino experienced a tragedy: his five-year-old daughter Heather died after being hit by a car. Levatino took some time off work to grieve his daughters death, and when he returned, something had changed. Heres how he described his experience of going back to work as an abortionist:

One day it was my turn to perform a second trimester abortion. As I started the procedure, I inserted a clamp and ripped out the babys arm. Then I paused for what seemed like forever, staring at the arm in the clamp. A procedure I had done over a hundred times before suddenly made me ill.

At that moment, the only thing that mattered was the innocent child whose life I had just ended. I lost my child, someone who was very precious to us. And now I am taking somebodys child and I am tearing him right out of their womb. I am killing somebodys child. That day marked the beginning of my journey from abortionist to pro-life advocate.

All of a sudden, I didnt see the patients wonderful right to choose, Levatino said in a 2011 interview. All I saw was somebodys son or daughter.

Levatino is far from the first abortionist to experience a wake-up call exposing abortion as a gravely unjust act that takes the life of an unborn human being. In the 1960s and 1970s, the late Dr. Bernard Nathanson presided over, by his own admission, more than sixty thousand abortions as director of the Center for Reproductive and Sexual Health. Prior to his pro-life conversion, Nathanson performed five thousand abortions himself, one of which took the life of his own child. In addition to being an abortionist, Nathanson was an activist who led the movement to overturn laws protecting the unborn. He cofounded the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws (NARAL), today known as NARAL Pro-Choice America. He assisted the legal team that challenged the Texas abortion law at stake in Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court case that invented a constitutional right to abortion.

Thankfully, Nathanson experienced a profound change of heart, sparked by the realization that the creature in the womb is a human being. In 1974, he admitted the increasing certainty that I had in fact presided over sixty thousand deaths. Over the subsequent years, Nathanson performed fewer and fewer abortions, limiting himself only to abortions he considered necessary for health reasons. But with the advent of medical technology such as the ultrasound, he found that he could no longer deny the humanity of the unborn child. By 1980, he quit performing abortions altogether. He went on to become one of the foremost leaders of the pro-life movement and produced a landmark documentary, The Silent Scream, which used ultrasound footage to depict the abortion of a twelve-week-old child in the womb.

The horrific reality of abortion has the power to change peoples lives and transform even the most hardened hearts. But despite the irrefutable reality of human life in the womb and the indisputable violence of abortion, we live in a society that permits abortion until birth for virtually any reason. We live in a society where many people believe that abortion is unobjectionable or even good. Since the Supreme Court invented a constitutional right to abortion in Roe v. Wade in 1973, abortion has killed more than sixty-five million of our youngest neighbors, a staggering loss. As we write, the Supreme Court is considering Dobbs v. Jackson Womens Health Organization, a case that could lead to the reversal of Roe and subsequent cases that have made it nearly impossible to legally prohibit abortion. If the Court does reverse Roe, it would be a major victory for the pro-life movement in the United States, which has argued for decades that we must alter the legal, political, and cultural frameworks enabling abortion.

Pro-lifers insist that every human being has intrinsic worth and value, and that a just society would protect the unborn from the lethal violence of abortion. By the time this book is in your hands, we will all know how the Court has ruled. No matter what the justices do, the pro-life movement must continue its work to ensure that every life is protected by law and welcomed in life, and that every mother and family receives the assistance needed to bring children into the world and raise them to maturity. This book is meant to equip readers to defend life as the pro-life movement looks to the future.

While its essential to focus on the unborn childwhose death is the gravest harm of abortiontheres much more that needs to be said, because abortion harms far more than the child in the womb. The case against abortion is far more comprehensive. Abortion harms every single one of us by perpetuating deeply rooted falsehoods about what it means to be human. Abortion attacks the humanity and value of the child in the womb. Abortion strikes at the bond between mother and child, turning it into a conflict between adversaries and a justification for violence, a relationship not of love but of antagonism and mutual destruction. Abortion corrupts the relationship between man and woman and rejects the responsibilities that mothers and fathers have to their children and to one another. Abortion cuts at the fabric of marriage and of entire families, harming mothers, fathers, siblings, and grandparents.

Abortion distorts science and corrupts medicine, pretending that the child in the womb isnt a human being at all and that tools meant for healing can rightly be turned to killing. Abortion perverts what it means to live in a justly ordered political community with laws that protect all of usand in a society where our laws say that some human beings dont deserve to live, we are all at risk. Abortion leads to a particular devaluation of unborn children diagnosed with illnesses or disorders in the womb, as well as a devaluation of girls in parts of the world where sons are more highly prized. It undermines solidarity with the poor, the weak, the marginalized, people with disabilities, and anyone on the periphery of life. It allows those in power to deem certain lives expendable, allowing people to eliminate populations that we dont want to have too many of, in the words of the late Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Abortion has been a disaster. As Mother Teresa once put it in an amicus curiae brief to the U.S. Supreme Court:

America needs no words from me to see how your decision in Roe v. Wade has deformed a great nation. The so-called right to abortion has pitted mothers against their children and women against men. It has sown violence and discord at the heart of the most intimate human relationships. It has aggravated the derogation of the fathers role in an increasingly fatherless society. It has portrayed the greatest of giftsa childas a competitor, an intrusion, and an inconvenience. It has nominally accorded mothers unfettered dominion over the independent lives of their physically dependent sons and daughters. And, in granting this unconscionable power, it has exposed many women to unjust and selfish demands from their husbands or other sexual partners. Human rights are not a privilege conferred by government. They are every human beings entitlement by virtue of his humanity. The right to life does not depend, and must not be declared to be contingent, on the pleasure of anyone else, not even a parent or a sovereign.