"It's Our Right"

It's our right to bear arms. It's our right to smoke. It's our right as women to have an abortion.

All these statements presume among other things that "our right" does not affect others. This could not be further from the truth. A man using his right to shot off a celebratory gunshot into the air on the 4th of July accidentally killed a young girl in a neighboring home playing in the yard with her family. This shot went quite a distance over trees and across a pond so far that the man didn't realize "his right" had even injured anyone until watching the evening news days later. Second hand smoke is an obvious infringement on others. But for some reason the most obvious one to me seems to not be so clear to so many, abortion.

My dear friend Trisha explains in her blog post how the actions of one affect so many, including me, because it wasn't for the choices of others I would never had the opportunity to be blessed by Trisha in my time of grief.

Here is her blog post:

On Survivor Guilt

 January 22 always hits me right between the eyes. I see it coming on the calendar weeks ahead of time and I make plans—happy plans that involve doing things with my family—things that I hope will distract me from the sober reality of the day. But then the day arrives, and inevitably I find myself hugging a box of Kleenex.
The truth is, I should have been aborted.
Okay, okay. I know I shouldn’t have been aborted because I wasn’t, but statistically, I should have been discarded the day my birth mom learned of my existence. She met all the acceptable criteria for an abortion.
Bottom line: She was unprepared and I was unwanted.
And yet here I am.
It’s almost 7pm and I am hoping the waterworks stop before my Kleenex run out, otherwise it’s going to get ugly.
Here’s the thing. We talk about children all the time in this country. Politicians use children as props to promote their causes (gun control, education, national debt). But you’ll notice that when a politician wants to discuss abortion, he puts a woman on stage and not a child.

You’ll never find children on the stage of a pro-abortion discussion. It’s a whole lot harder to talk about abortion when you’re looking at children instead of statistics.

So here it goes.
I am no statistic. I am a human being. I am the product of a relationship that didn’t last. I was not planned and likewise unwanted by those who would have been my family. My birth mother was unprepared for motherhood, didn’t have a place to live, had an ultimatum from a boyfriend, and barely had money in her pocket. But—with the help of those who saw my birth mother as a person instead of a problem—she found the courage to do the hard thing. As a result, I was adopted. I have adopted. I will adopt again.
Next time you hear people couching abortion as a “woman’s right,” consider the fact that women-to-be are aborted every single day. The only women whose rights get honored are the ones who were given life in the first place.
Today is a dark day in this country. January 22, 1973, was stamped on death certificates for millions who were not yet conceived.
That it wasn’t stamped on mine is something I pray I will never take for granted.
http://www.househoncho.com/2013/01/on-survivor-guilt/