Dear President,

I am writing this to you today because it is an important topic to me and I would love to share what I think to you.

My name is Megan Verstraete and I’m a senior at Grand River Preparatory High School. I am in a World Geography class that is encouraging me to contact you about an important issue to me. I was interested in this because I like to discuss controversial topics in a respectful and professional way and I’m excited to share what I think about this topic.

The issue that always catches my attention is on abortion and I would like to lead you on the mind set that I am on. I am pro-life. Abortion should be prohibited. It should not be allowed because it is not the only way to deal with an unexpected child, every person deserves to live, and even though the baby is still in the womb, abortion is considered murder. I ask you to join me in diving into the facts on why abortion should be illegal.

First off, there are many other different ways to go about dealing with an unplanned pregnancy instead of going straight to abortion. There is no sense in killing a baby when adoption can be the saviour to most of those types of situations. In doing so, no innocent lives would be ended, the unplanned baby is able to find a home that wants it, and the baby will be able to live a life instead of not having a chance to at all. “Those who choose abortions are often minors or young women with insufficient life experience to understand fully what they are doing. Many have lifelong regrets afterwards.” (Lowen) It is understandable that choosing to have an abortion is a difficult decision, but because there are other alternatives in handling the situation, there are regrets in the decisions made, and women don’t know what they are doing until it is too late to realize that it was a mistake. Adoption kills three birds with one stone. With having a baby to give away, adoption makes the mother happy for the baby, the baby happy for living, and a new family happy because of what they have been longing for without ending any lives that deserve to live.

Some people may say that women may not have had the choice of becoming pregnant so it should be up to the woman to decide what she wants for the baby. While this statement is fair for the woman, no one is paying attention to the fairness of the baby’s life. Yes, the woman might be satisfied if there is no baby to care for, but that is one innocent life that the woman is taking away just because she doesn’t want anything to do with it. This reasoning leads back to there being other alternatives for handling this type of unplanned situation.

Secondly, abortion causes pain. Physically and psychologically. While trying to decide whether or not to pursue the decision of getting an abortion, it can be exhausting and stressful. Physically, abortion can hurt obviously, but the stress weighs down and it begins to overcome the person who needs to make that decision. Once the decision is made, the emotional and psychological pain starts to weigh in. Abortion isn’t easy at all, yet it still happens and is going to continue to happen if people don’t do anything about it. The grief, the doubt, and the hardship of abortion is not worth it when adoption can be just around the corner for the new baby.

Lastly, abortion is considered murder. When pregnant, a baby is developing inside the mother’s womb. Once the baby is in the womb, it is considered living and it does breathe. Many comments were being made that because the baby is not on earth or outside of the mother’s womb, it isn’t considered living. While people are pregnant, eventually, they get an ultrasound. Taken from the dictionary definition, an ultrasound is the application of ultrasonic waves to therapy or diagnostics, as in deep-heat treatment of a joint or imaging of internal structures. This definition is saying that an ultrasound looks at the changes of a baby from an internal perspective, meaning, looking at if the baby is breathing or moving, how the heart is developing, and how the overall progress of the baby’s growth is doing. If people get these tests done to see if the baby is breathing or if it is moving, it is then living inside the womb. The dictionary definition of murder is the killing of another human being under conditions specifically covered in law. Getting an abortion is killing the baby, another human being, inside the womb and if mothers are scanned to see if their baby is breathing, killing it would be considered a murder.

Yes, abortion is a hard decision to make, but it shouldn’t be. People should focus on how they are going to set their child up for well lived lives and not on whether or not they should get an abortion and end a life. In the long run, if more children end up in foster care rather than having abortion be their future, then the step should be made and spread to those who need to hear this plea for children the most.

Thank you for your time,

Megan Verstraete