I’m going to do something that has become so unusual I do believe I should get a prize. I, wait for it, am going to talk against abortion without ever mentioning God, religion, or any kind of theological or deist implication. No seriously, do a CTRL+F after this paragraph, I’ll give you a dollar if I’m wrong. The main argument for abortion is simply that the fetus is not a person. The Pro-Choice camp claims that a lump of fetal cells does not count as a living, breathing human, and said lump belongs to the mother and should have no legal protection. The facts of the matter are that all of the above statements are wrong.

Let’s start with the biggest and most obvious issue; whether a lump of fetal cells counts as ‘life.' On the most basic level, yes. Biology has five criteria that an organism has to meet before it can be considered ‘alive.' They have to be made out of cells, obtain and use energy, move, grow, and develop, reproduce, and respond or adapt to their environment. If all of these criteria are met, then the subject at hand is a bona fide 100 percent living organism. However, to be fair, just because something is living doesn’t make it a human. The fact that being conceived by two humans, growing inside a human, and being certain that it will grow up into a human makes it a human.

Once it had been established that the fetal cells are indeed life, and human, the next common arguments are that the fetus is part of a woman’s body and it's her right to choose, neither of which are accurate. Inside each of us is D.N.A. Genetic material that is unique to us and never has, or ever will, be duplicated again. The second the sperm fertilizes the egg, the unique genetic code is written that can never be naturally created again. Say the technology were there and I was to clone a lump of fetal cells. That organism would grow into an exact replica of the child and not the mother that housed the fetus. Even if this wasn’t true, that still doesn’t give the woman the right to remove the fetus because a doctor, under the Hippocratic Oath, cannot remove body parts upon request. If someone went to a doctor and begged, with all their heart and soul, to have the doctor remove their perfectly functioning arm, the doctor could not do it. No matter how much the person paid, pleaded, or threatened, the doctor would turn that person away at the door.

I’m sure by this point, many people will say “Okay, all those things are true, but the Supreme Court ruled in favor of abortion, so it’s legal. Deal with it.” It’s a fair point, the Supreme Court is a legal institution of the United States Federal Government and their judgement does deserve a certain level of respect. However, since it’s an institution that declared in favor of segregation, then against segregation, blacks not being people, and then blacks being people, their judgement doesn’t deserve that level of respect. Along with the Supreme Court’s inherent fickleness are several contradictions in basic U.S law, the most prominent being the Unborn Victims of Violence Act passed in 2004. According to this act the law must recognize a child in utero as a legal victim if they are injured or killed during the commission of any of over 60 listed federal violence crimes with a ‘child in utero’ being defined as "a member of the species Homo sapiens, at any stage of development, who is carried in the womb." That means that, according to U.S Law, if a woman is shot dead a day after she is impregnated, the guilty party has committed a double murder.

Thomas Jefferson famously wrote that "all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." This phrase is why I am against abortion in every way, shape, and form, because the act deprives the child of their life, their freedom, and the ability to make with it what they can. In short, abortion is un-American.