Let's set the record straight right out of the gate: The decision to have an abortion is not easily made by most women. But continuing the sanitized view of abortion as a "women's health issue" or "reproductive rights" is inaccurate. And recent events exposing Planned Parenthood have unmasked the abortion industry at its ugliest.
In shocking, unedited videos, Planned Parenthood has been caught in its practice of dealing dead baby parts. Each video shows health care professionals talking about the process of harvesting organs during abortions, often by using ultrasound guidance to protect vital infant organs like the liver and heart. These "physicians," sworn by the Hippocratic Oath to "do no harm, have demonstrated the abortion industry's unholy commitment to find profit in organs and tissue from unborn babies.
For decades, abortion has been redefined and repackaged as a "simple" and "safe" choice for women who no longer wish to carry a child to term, even though the access to birth control has become readily available almost everywhere. Simultaneously, abortion has been established as an elective procedure, an easily available "health care choice" used under the rationale of rape, incest or protecting the life of the mother.
One percent of all abortions performed involve a victim of rape or incest. Finding statistics on therapeutic abortions - performed in the event of the mother's life being endangered by the pregnancy - is as difficult as finding hen's teeth. Based on the pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute's large study from 2004, only 1.03 percent surveyed claimed their abortions were a result of a possible "physical problem" affecting their well-being. Even the Centers for Disease Control reports only surgical versus medical abortions, which divides the procedure into those where the size of the baby required surgical intervention to cease life versus the use of medicine to poison of the child at early gestational age, and not therapeutic abortions.
Sick. But not only is it horrific; it's also not actual birth control. At best, the procedures represent personal population control.
On Jan, 21, 2015, using data from the Guttmacher Institute and the CDC, the National Right to Life Committee reported about 58 million babies in the womb have been aborted since 1973, the year the Supreme Court erroneously ruled abortion on demand was a woman's right.
Averaging 1.4 million abortions each year for 42 years, America has permitted an inexplicable act, one that has killed enough babies on an annual basis to match the populations of Nashville and Memphis combined. Think about it: on average, American women have chosen to abort the combined population of the two largest Tennessee cities every year for more than four decades.
Yet, even though the term "Silent Holocaust" applies to this sickening state of events, no one dares say it. But how else can you describe the indignity and offense of 58 million dead unborn babies?
Expecting adults to use birth control when they decide to become sexually active is too much for some to handle. Treating sexual intercourse as more than an act of self-gratification gets rejected by those who don't want to acknowledge that life is created through unprotected sex and that responsible parties are just that responsible.
Will Americans choose a culture that assigns value to life in the womb, to men and women equally, and to all regardless of race? We won't know. The death of Cecil the Lion has been deemed more important.
Robin Smith, a former chairwoman of the Tennessee Republican Party, is owner of Rivers Edge Alliance.