Each year, about 200 UCLA women visit the Arthur Ashe Student Health and Wellness Center because they are pregnant.
And, as nurse practitioner and counselor Ann Brooks stated last fall, “Most of the students I talk to terminate the pregnancies.”
It is no surprise that we almost never see a pregnant student on campus. These are our friends: the one we pass by on Bruin Walk, the person sitting next to us in class, the girl in line at the dining hall. In this way, abortion affects us all.
Presidential hopefuls Mitt Romney, Rudy Giuliani and John McCain have all had their pro-life credibility questioned by conservative party members. Giuliani bears the brunt of the scrutiny, and it is no surprise; he himself states that “the present state of the law (on abortion) is not something that I would seek to change.”
On the other side, candidates Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John Edwards all unexpectedly decried the Supreme Court’s decision to uphold the congressional ban on partial-birth abortion. This disappointed many moderate and pro-life democrats who, along with the majority of both parties, supported the ban. As represented in Congress, the majority of Americans voted to end the gruesome and inhumane procedure that sucked the brains out of a living, partially delivered, 6-months-or-older baby.
With Republican candidates’ unsure pro-life footing, and without any major Democratic candidate supporting the partial-birth abortion ban, the 2008 presidential election stage is set for unhappy and unheard voters.
Meanwhile, abortion continues to end almost 25 percent of all pregnancies in America , and this tragic surplus of abortions hits close to home on our own campus.
Some abortion doctors continue to practice partial-birth abortion ““ with enough variations from the original procedure that they comply with the ban, but still take the lives of unborn babies that are 6 to 9 months old.
According to the Guttmacher Institute, there are 3,700 abortions a day in America. That’s about one abortion every 23 seconds. In the time it took you to read this short paragraph, one more American woman has submitted to an abortion. Over 30 million women in our country are post-abortive, with 1 in every 3 women having had at least one abortion.
With numbers like these, it is no surprise that almost everyone in our society has been affected by abortion personally. This alone is enough to cause voters to care deeply about the abortion issue.
In 1973, the Supreme Court effectively legalized abortion through all 9 months of pregnancy. That was 34 years ago ““ before almost all of us were born. But abortion still demands our attention. Perhaps our inability to resolve the issue is a result of our failure to reduce the 25 percent abortion rate or to make progress by reforming adoption laws.
According to a 2004 Zogby International poll, 56 percent of Americans think that abortion on demand should be illegal. (18 percent said it should never be legal; 15 percent legal for mother’s life only; 23 percent legal only for mother’s life/rape/incest).
As for our peers, Americans 18 to 29 years old are even more against abortion. Sixty percent of us take the pro-life position, including 26 percent who say “never legal.”
Another 61 percent would outlaw abortion after an unborn child’s heart has begun to beat, at 22 days of gestation.
For most Americans, millions of innocent unborn lives are at risk, and the 2008 presidential candidates on both sides should take heed.
We all have the right to vote. Let’s exercise that right, but before we do, let’s research and discuss our positions carefully.
Once we are decided, let’s choose to support the candidates that genuinely represent our views. We owe it to the 200 Bruins that face abortion each year, and we owe it to ourselves. After all, abortion is a life-or-death issue and it isn’t going away.
Rose is a third-year history student.