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Clare BrownLisa Huff AP English Comp.December 14, 2007AbortionMichael Vick, a former Atlanta Falcons top-ranked quarterback, was recentlyindicted in Virginia. He went to trial with possibilities of receiving six years in prison anda $350,000 fine for murdering dogs that didn’t perform adequately in dog fights he heldat his Virginia home (Wittmeyer). How is it possibly fair that Vick could get such asevere punishment while there is no penalty for killing an unborn baby? It’s simple. It’snot. Abortion, the gruesome ending of a human life, should be a punishable crime.Abortion is an issue that evokes, on all sides, very strong feelings and judgments and very heated recriminations. The most radical formulation of the anti-abortion or "pro-life" side of the debate views abortion as the murder of unborn children, and so as the equivalent of out and out infanticide, makingthe legal use of abortion since

Roe v. Wade

, at a rate of around 1.5 million ayear in the United States, into a holocaust of the innocent fully comparable tothe Nazi genocide against the Jews. (Ross)Life begins at conception; therefore, aborting the life of a fetus is equally aswrong as ending the life of a full grown man. Though there are many disputes on whenlife begins, countless definitions state that the development of humans begins when thesperm of a man meets the ovum of a woman- conception. For instance, the Bible,which is used by nearly 80% of the United States, informs that life not only starts at

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conception, but that God knows each baby’s destiny before he is even conceived.Many may fight that abortion is only wrong on a non-secular level, but those who don’tuse the Bible surely have a dictionary. It shows that the definition of conception- evenoutside the boundaries of birth- means beginning; therefore, the moment of conceptionmarks the beginning of a baby’s life. Because fetuses develop quickly, they often havedeveloped organs by the time of abortion. Equivalent to killing a person, abortiondenies a baby his civil rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness- one of the mostfamous promises made by the Declaration of Independence.If it is illegal to inflict pain on a human, shouldn’t it be illegal to inflict pain on anunborn baby? After researching this troubling topic, Dr. R. Frank White found thatfetuses may feel pain “after eleven weeks of development”. Just hearing a baby cryfrom needing to be burped is saddening. Thinking about a baby, which is still maturingits nerve controls, getting a brain hemorrhage after being suffocated from saline solutionis sickening. Consider this story that a shaken nurse told to Congress to support a pro-life verdict in an abortion case:The baby's little fingers were clasping and unclasping, and his little feet werekicking. Then the doctor stuck the scissors in the back of his head, and thebaby's arms jerked out, like a startle reaction, like a flinch, like a baby doeswhen he thinks he is going to fall. The doctor opened the scissors, stuck ahigh-powered suction tube into the opening and sucked the baby's brains out.Now the baby went completely limp. (Snow)

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This story is deeply disturbing, and it seems unreal that any woman desires to putsomeone through this. Yes, many might debate that there are times when a pregnantwoman could be in danger from her baby, but society should place more emphasis onan innocent, unlived life than on someone who has experienced living. Pro-choiceactivists might also argue that a woman wanting an abortion has a right to the freedomto choose the actions taken upon her body. She does have a choice. By choosing tohave sex. The majority of abortion cases are because a woman is selfish or embarrassed or doesn’t want to deal with such an inconvenience as a baby. Studiesshow that “1% of all abortions occur because of rape or incest; 6% of abortions occur because of potential health problems regarding either the mother or child, and 93% of all abortions occur for social reasons (i.e. the child is unwanted or inconvenient)”(Abortion). The only acceptable reason for causing human death should be in rare self-defense cases. If in society today, a child can get kicked out of school for merelythreatening one of his peers, shouldn’t it be illegal to rip the head off of a baby?Unfortunately, our culture seems to put more value on matters that areless important than innocent babies. A week rarely goes by when there isn’t an article inthe paper about a lady with 49 cats getting fined for animal cruelty. How is it worse tohave an unsafe living environment for some cats, which are cute and living animals butdon’t think or have souls like humans, than to kill an unblemished baby? A few yearsago, Jack Kevorkian- known as Dr. Death- received a 25-year jail sentence for assistinga man in suicide- a man who asked for his life to be taken. Unborn babies don’t have asay in their lives, yet there is no punishment for their murderers. There are numerouslaws that seem to put more emphasis on trivial positions than on more substantial