Tuesday, May 20, 2014

Pro-Life: A Youth Movement

Well I've been hearing for a while now that the teens and twentysomethings of today are very pro-life. Secular Pro-Life states that this generation is the most pro-life and least religious since Roe V. Wade. We have groups like Students for Life, and Pro-Life groups, marches, and rallies are having increasing amounts of youth. We really are the pro-life generation.

It makes sense that the youth would be the most pro-life for a number of reasons. For one thing, abortion is the most ageist/childist act, so of course the youth, given that they were not as far away from being in utero as their elders, as well as the fact that they still have to constantly go through lots of ageism as you aren't treated as a real human being until you are a legal adult (or then some), would be pro-life and fight for their fellow youth just like they would with any injustice put on one of them. This is a big reason why I always hated it. Being very liberal, I always had a sense of realizing the youthism there is, wanting a teenage revolution, and being anti-establishment, so I definitely saw abortion as the worst human rights violation against kids.

Also, the kids of today have had abortion legalized for their whole lives and then some. It's a bit different for someone in their 40s who is pro-life, becuase they never had to think about how they could have been a casualty to this, and it would be perfectly legal. Abortion was only legalized in the 70s, so for those who are in their 30s or below, there is a much greater sense of being a survivor. Those who are just like us have fallen victim to abortion. Some of our classmates and potential friends are gone because of this. A third of our generation is gone because of abortion. I definitely have had that creepy feeling while thinking of how it feels to be this lucky to have been given life when my mother could have aborted me. I often wonder how many abortions were performed the year I was born. Abortion has always been around, but not to this extent and not legalized like this. So really it would be like any group fighting for others in said group. Really it just makes sense to fight for our younger brethren. We may not be embryos, but we are still youth. Think of gay people who don't plan on getting married fighting for marriage equality so that their kind who do wish to can have that opportunity. It hits so much more close to home for the younger generations. It's personal.

Another thing is that, well really a big reason why most Americans are pro-life now, we have better technology and access to the internet, and you know how the stereotype goes... The kids are the ones addicted to the internet and their smart phones and tablets and texting, and the older folks are the ones who can't figure it out. Sure, some older people are very technology wise, but the youth really are the ones who use this stuff more. We are the generation who grew up around it. It comes as second nature to us. And of course, you can find out the humanity of the unborn on the internet. You can go and look up different stages of fetal development and what happens at conception, find out the heart starts beating at 3 weeks after conception and the brain is the first organ to show up, at 2 weeks, and science says all over the place that it is indeed another unique and individual living human being that just happens to be growing inside of the woman but is not part of her, and so on and so forth.

There are better ultrasound/sonogram pictures than ever before, progressing past the very hard to see black and white original ones and moving to 3D and 4D. You can find pictures or video of what the embryos and fetuses look like inside the womb on the internet. You can even take home 3D statues of what your little one looks like in utero. The Endowment of Human Development has a lot of good videos of the unborn. You can literally see the heart beating, the blood pumping, as the skin is a bit translucent, at only a handful of weeks after conception. The truth is, most pro-choicers are pro-choice because they either don't know or don't understand the humanity of the unborn. Science and technology help them realize it little by little, and the kids are at the forefront of the technological age. If they are pro-choice, they can be smug and say "It's not a human, here, I'll prove it to you" and actually bother to look it up with the intentions of schooling those pro-lifers, but in reality realize how very wrong they were. I've heard it time and time again: Knowledge turns people pro-life, and the pro-choice side has a great fear of knowledge. If the kids are lucky enough to realize this, and the internet and better technology makes it easier, they become more and more pro-life. It is definitely not "just a clump of cells", sadly most pro-choicers still believe this, but it's easier than ever to find out how wrong that is.

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