The birth of a child is a miracle. Anyone who has witnessed a baby entering the world and taking its first breath would surely agree.

When a baby is born prematurely, it is amazing to see the effort doctors put into keeping that little life alive, even if it has a low chance of surviving. While a large amount of personnel, expertise and resources are devoted to caring for babies prematurely delivered at 25 weeks, other babies of the same age are callously murdered and disposed of. The difference? Whether or not the mother wants them. This is her “right to choose”: If she wants the baby, it is a precious, tiny, little boy or girl whom doctors will diligently and even desperately work to save. If she does not want the baby, it is inanimate “tissue.”

The mother has the right to choose whether or not her baby has the right to live.

Abortion is considered normal today. But stop and realize that there are an estimated 125,000 abortions per day worldwide. Visit this website for a live count of the estimated number of abortions worldwide this year—so far.

About 800,000 babies per year are aborted in America. In 2015, 1 out of every 5 American pregnancies ended in abortion.

What a contrast: Some couples do everything they can to have a healthy baby, and other people brutally kill unborn infants—even during labor!

This is not something that happens in the dark, in secret, like other murders. This is something that politicians fall over each other to champion. Activists tell women to “shout your abortion” with pride.

In January, Virginia Governor Ralph Northam discussed third-trimester abortions in an radio interview, saying, “So in this particular example, if a mother is in labor, I can tell you exactly what would happen. The infant would be delivered. The infant would be kept comfortable. The infant would be resuscitated if that’s what the mother and the family desired. And then a discussion would ensue between the physicians and the mother.”

A discussion about what? What is there to discuss?

Northam was saying that a mother and physicians could cause the baby to die even after it is born.

Did you know some babies survive abortions? An abortion procedure is successful if it results in a dead baby. But sometimes, rarely, the procedure is not “successful”: The baby lives. Most of the time, he or she lives only for a few minutes or hours, especially if not cared for. But in some few cases, these unwanted infants receive medical care and survive into adulthood. And what a story they have to tell! These survivors are a living testament to the fact that a fetus aborted at any time in the pregnancy isn’t just a clump of cells—it’s a living human being. It is a life!

With all the debate over abortion, why don’t we hear more from abortion survivors?

The Heritage Foundation explained what led to the Born-Alive Infants Protection Act (emphasis added throughout):

In the mid-1990s through the early 2000s, more than two dozen states and the United States Congress passed legislation banning partial-birth abortion (pba). It is a gruesome procedure in which a living baby is vaginally delivered until it is partially outside the mother’s body and then killed (typically by puncturing the skull and removing the brains). In 2000, the Supreme Court struck down a Nebraska ban on partial-birth abortion.

The court “considered the location of an infant’s body at the moment of death during a partial-birth abortion—delivered partially outside the body of the mother—to be of no legal significance” under the precedence of Roe v. Wade, which created the right to abort “unborn children.”

In a later Third Circuit Court of Appeals decision, that logic led the court to conclude that an infant’s status under law, regardless of the child’s location, was entirely dependent on whether or not the mother intended to have an abortion or give birth.

Because the Supreme Court said you can kill a baby even after he or she is partially born, pro-life advocates in Congress proposed the Born-Alive Infants Protection Act. Their committee report stated:

Under the logic of these decisions, once a child is marked for abortion, it is wholly irrelevant whether that child emerges from the womb as a live baby. That child may still be treated as though he or she did not exist, and would not have any rights under the law—no right to receive medical care, to be sustained in life, or to receive any care at all. And if a child who survives an abortion and is born alive would have no claim to the protections of the law, there would, then, be no basis upon which the government may prohibit an abortionist from completely delivering an infant before killing it or allowing it to die. The “right to abortion,” under this logic, means nothing less than the right to a dead baby, no matter where the killing takes place.

Congress voted on the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act earlier this year. The bill stipulates that “any health care practitioner present” during an abortion procedure where the infant is born alive must “exercise the same degree of professional skill, care and diligence to preserve the life and health of the child as a reasonably diligent and conscientious health-care practitioner would render to any other child born alive at the same gestational age.”

The bill didn’t say anything about outlawing abortion itself: It only ensured that any infant born alive, regardless of circumstances, cannot be left to die.

It’s hard to believe that we need a law like this. How could anyone vote against it? Yet that is exactly what Democrats in the Senate did, including the prominent presidential candidates. They are on record as voting no to the Born-Alive Survivors Protection Act.

A bill saying that babies who survive abortions must not be left to die failed to pass into law.

This is insane legalized infanticide.

What is the first right asserted by the Declaration of Independence? The right to life. But abortionists deny babies—even after they are born—that right. Then they turn around and claim to be distraught over the idea of children being separated from parents who have immigrated illegally.

Opponents of the bill called it an attack on “reproductive health care.” Others claimed that the legislation was unnecessary because this never actually happens—babies never survive abortions.

However, there are hundreds of survivors on this Earth who prove them wrong. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 143 babies survived an abortion procedure between 2003 and 2014 in the U.S. The organization admitted that there were probably many more cases that weren’t recorded. There are survivors, and those survivors have chilling, heart-wrenching stories to tell.

Jill Stanek, a nurse who testified before the Senate in May 2013, encountered an abortion survivor in the Illinois hospital where she worked. She testified that she had discovered that babies were being “aborted alive and shelved to die in the hospital’s soiled utility room.” When a 21-to-22-week-old little boy with Down syndrome was aborted and left to die, Stanek decided she couldn’t just leave him there. She went into the room and rocked the tiny abortion survivor in her arms until he died 45 minutes later. This heart-wrenching experience has made her a strong pro-life advocate.

You can see why abortion organization Planned Parenthood doesn’t want mothers who are getting an abortion to see an ultrasound or hear the baby’s heartbeat. That is a tiny life! And he or she is being disposed of like a piece of garbage! This practice is sickening, disgusting and barbaric.

One abortion survivor, Melissa Ohden, testified before Congress in June this year. She was born alive in 1977 during a botched saline abortion. In her moving testimony, she argued that if the central issue of the abortion debate is women’s rights, what about the rights of all the little girls whose lives are snuffed out in the womb? She said:

Our culture has been inundated with messaging in which abortion controls the narrative. …

The most important stories, though, are those that you will likely never hear—the stories of the little girls who will never live outside of the womb.

In all of this discussion about women’s rights, some lose sight of the fact that without the right to life, there are no other rights.

Without the right to life, there are no other rights!

“There’s something deeply disturbing about the reality in our world that I have a right to an abortion,” Ohden said, “but I never had the simple right to live.”

This woman now has the legal right to abort a child. But according to the same law that gives her that right, she should never have existed!

Ohden’s medical records say that “a saline infusion for an abortion was done, but was unsuccessful.” Imagine using that word to describe an abortion—“unsuccessful”—as if an abortion is a success!

The media would like you to believe that people like this woman don’t exist. Quartz magazine wrote in February this year: “An abortion is performed with the intention of ending a pregnancy, so there are no survivors.”

However, through her Abortion Survivors Network, Ohden has connected with almost 300 other abortion survivors. The network’s website says its goal is “to put a face to the statistics of abortion survivors, informing and educating the public about the prevalence of survivors and providing a perspective to abortion that is seldom heard: that of the child.”

Another member of the network, Claire Culwell, survived a dilation and curettage late-term abortion at five months. This type of abortion combines suction with the use of a spoon-shaped instrument to remove the fetus in pieces. However, Culwell’s 13-year-old birth mother didn’t realize that she was pregnant with twins—so only one of the babies died. Realizing weeks later that she was still pregnant, her birth mother sought a second abortion but couldn’t get it, so Claire was born.

Josiah Presley, a young South Korean who was adopted into an American family, also survived a dilation and curettage abortion. This young man is perfectly healthy today, except that he has a deformed left arm—probably a result of the failed abortion.

Gianna Jessen is the survivor of a saline infusion abortion at 7½ months. She was born with cerebral palsy because of the loss of oxygen to her brain during the abortion procedure. Her medical records state, “Born during saline abortion.” Despite what was done to her, Jessen is a singer, a speaker and a powerful pro-life advocate.

Pro-abortion lawmakers often argue that abortions must be legal because of cases of rape or incest, or when the mother’s health is at risk. Then when pro-life lawmakers bring up abortion survivors, they say that these are such a small percentage of cases that they can’t be used as a basis for law.

Ironic.

Florida is one of the few states that records a reason for every abortion. The state recorded 70,083 abortions in 2018 for reasons of incest (0.01 percent) rape, (0.14 percent), endangerment to the mother’s life (0.27 percent), serious fetal abnormality (1 percent), endangerment to the mother’s physical health (1.48 percent), and endangerment to the mother’s psychological health (1.67 percent).

The abortions that were committed for social or economic reasons: 20 percent. The abortions that were committed for “no reason (elective)”: 75.4 percent.

So 95.4 percent of all abortions in the state of Florida last year were admittedly not due to rape, incest or danger, but because a baby was inconvenient for the mother.

In 2 Timothy 3:1-3, the Apostle Paul prophesied about what these last days would be like—people would be “lovers of their own selves” and “without natural affection.” You would think that the natural impulse of any pregnant mother would be to protect the little life inside her. But today, many in our society are missing even the natural affection that you would expect from any clear-thinking human being.

What does this say about our society? Are we really advancing? Are we really progressing? It’s so easy to become desensitized to abortion because society has accepted it. But without the right to life, what other right is there?

Herbert W. Armstrong explained the real reason why abortion is wrong in Mystery of the Ages:

When man receives the Holy Spirit of God the very Spirit and mind of the immortal God is injected into him. It joins with his human spirit. The Spirit of God cannot be received by, or injected into, the brute animal because the animal has no spirit within itself with which the Spirit of God could combine.

At this point, let me inject a truth that, at the time this is being written, is probably the most controversial question at issue among the Western world’s population—the question of abortion.

The human spirit enters the human embryo at conception. It is this spirit that may, upon adult conversion, be united with the Holy Spirit from the great Creator God, impregnating that human with God-life as a child of the living God, in a state of gestation, though as yet unborn. To destroy an embryo or a fetus in a mother’s uterus is to murder a potential future God being.

Therefore, abortion is murder.

Abortion is far more than just snuffing out the life of a mother’s unwanted child. It is murdering a potential future God being! Every baby is a life that God wants to make in His own image and likeness—and people today just snuff it out like it is nothing. Every child is His child and a potential future spiritual son in His ever expanding Family!

Abortion is murder! There is no other way to describe it. Labeling an unborn infant “unwanted tissue” doesn’t take away his or her right to life, any more than labeling a 30-year-old man or woman “unwanted tissue” makes it OK to murder them.

God is serious about this subject. We must be too.

To understand more about God’s view on abortion, read our article “Is Abortion Really Murder?” To learn more about the incredible purpose behind the reproductive process, read Just What Do You Mean—Born Again?