Abortion, a moral issue?

                I have been raised in a family where even the idea of holding a boys hand is not ok, calling someone my boyfriend is not even an option, but the biggest line of all was drawn at having sex outside of a marriage. I am a seventeen year old, growing up in a society where all of this is acceptable, maybe even encouraged, but I’m living in an Egyptian Coptic Orthodox household where these norms are seemingly unthinkable.

My father and mother have blatantly told me that if I were to ever get pregnant outside of marriage, they would disown me; and never for a second do I doubt these threats. So when I am asked in my private Christian school if I would ever consider having an abortion, I shrink down and promise to myself that I will never have to make that decision, because knowing my parents beliefs, I am shamefully aware that my answer may not be morally right.

                Abortion is a growing political dispute especially in our country. Nearly 50% of pregnancies are unwanted and tragically almost half of those are “terminated” --The word that the world decides to use instead of “kill” because if that word was used, it would clear that what they are really doing is murdering. So in essence, 42 MILLION women choose to terminate their pregnancy. Let me put that in perspective for you. In the Holocaust, approximately 11 million people were killed and Stalin killed around 20 million. How absurd and alarming is it that the two largest mass murders in world history still don’t add up to the amount of lives ended by abortion. And now we have people in society saying that abortion is not even a “moral issue.” Excuse me, but how is murdering 42 innocent lives not a moral issue? If our society is going to accept that idealism then we might as well go ahead and accept that what Hitler and Stalin did wasn’t a moral issue either. They were making life how they believed it ought to be, even if that meant taking out millions of innocent lives to do so.  

                By this point, you may very well think I’m crazy, for comparing abortion to the Holocaust, but numbers don’t lie. Yes, a woman who decides to have an abortion only takes one life, while Hitler took millions, but it is the principle of not valuing a human life. I know there are many other opinions on the technicalities, but in the opinion of myself and my father who is a doctor, once a sperm penetrates an egg you have created human life. Human life, is a gift from God, if the creator of all things didn’t want you having this baby then do you think it would be happening right now?

                I am a firm believer in God, I am a firm believer in the fact that everything in life, including pregnancies, will occur just as He planned for them. And most importantly, I am a firm believer in the Ten Commandments which clearly states that killing is a sin, punishable by death. Yes, my dad may be one of the scariest human beings alive when he is angry, but nothing is scarier to me than an eternity in hell. So for that very reason, if I were ever to be asked if I was willing to kill my own unborn baby, NO MATTER the circumstances, I would be able to confidently and powerfully say NO.