By Clare Toman

The discussion of rights is important. There are many popular rights movements in our time and in the previous century, like women’s and black rights. But I think that we should also be focusing on the rights of unborn children.

I believe that we should be doing more about these rights because they aren’t like black rights or women’s rights. Those are, and have been, movements of people protecting their rights, but an unborn child can’t defend his or her rights. In your life you will see many marches and events for rights, but you are never going to see a march of unborn children, because they are just that, unborn.  The fact that they are unborn is exactly why we need to do marches and protests for them, because they can’t do it for themselves.

I don’t even mean that we should be protecting these rights as Catholics; we should be doing this as people. You don’t need God to know that murder is wrong, it just is. If it’s a crime to murder someone, why does murdering a person in their earliest from of life not count as a crime? Abortion shouldn’t only be fought by people of the Church and it shouldn’t be considered a view only shared by the Church; abortion is murder and murder is wrong. Our government puts people I jail for murder, but the ability to kill an unborn child is something that people in our government are fighting for. As I previously said, this isn’t even about religion; you don’t need to be a religious person to know that murder is wrong.

To be honest, abortion has always seemed olden to me, like one of those things that happened centuries ago, but everyone has learned from and people find atrocious nowadays, like slavery and all those unusual medieval punishments. It’s just hard to believe that abortion is still around. It seems like one of those topics that in fifty years, children will learn about and think about how malicious the people in the past were, like how we think about how women couldn’t always vote or people weren’t always thought to be equal. Abortion is just so terrible that it’s hard to even believe it exists in our society.

As Catholics, we should be respecting life and opening our hearts to life, as opposed to doing barbaric procedures like murdering unborn children. God has given us this life and we should be using it to help people and change the world.

In conclusion, we should be protecting the rights of the unborn. The unborn are vulnerable; they can’t defend themselves. We need to be the ones defending them. In our day and age, there are plenty of rights people are defending and we need to make a huge effort to make sure that the rights of the unborn are being protected too. So please, respect life, say no to abortion.