Dear Editor: Abortion is More Worrisome than Gun Violence

Dear Editor,

Usually more than half of all gun deaths that occur in this country are due to suicide or accident. Therefore of the 715,000 gun deaths that occurred in the US in the last 20 years, as mentioned in last week’s letter to the Editor, around 300,000 were homicides. All gun death is tragic, especially gun homicide. While I do not believe gun control is the answer to this problem I do believe it is imperative that we as a country address what is causing people to kill others. Guns are a tool to kill but they are not the cause. While we can acknowledge the gun homicide rate is much too high, please consider the statistics concerning the death rate of the most innocent of all people - the unborn. In EVERY YEAR since abortion became legal, the number of babies killed is at least twice as high as the total number of people killed in the last TWENTY YEARS from gun homicide. The lowest number of babies killed in a single year was over 740,000, the highest was over 1.6 million. Over 61 million babies have been killed since Roe v. Wade legalized abortion in 1973. Let that number sink in - 61 million. To give that number perspective, consider that in all the wars this country has been involved in, the number of Americans killed totaled 1.3 million. That includes both World Wars, the Civil War, the Vietnam War, the Korean War, every war. More babies were killed in one year (1990 - 1.6 million) than Americans were killed in all the wars in the history of our country.

Scientific knowledge has greatly increased since the 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling. Among scientists today there is overwhelming consensus that once fertilization takes place a new individual biological human life begins. In Roe v. Wade the Supreme Court stated that if the personhood of an unborn child was ever established, the case for abortion would collapse because the fetus’ right to life would therefore be guaranteed by the 14th Amendment. This is where we are today - why then does abortion continue? Why is it that instead of acknowledging the fact that science is now able to confirm the personhood of the unborn child and its right to life, abortion supporters choose to deny the science, refuse to protect the lives of the unborn, and instead push for abortion to be legalized at even later gestation dates, even up to the point of birth.

Scientific fact is clear that the unborn are fully human from the time of conception. Gun violence is truly tragic, but a worse tragedy of our times is the choice we have made to kill over 61 million of our most vulnerable fellow human beings through abortion.

Leslie Alley

Whitehall, MT