Editor’s note. Over this week and into the next, NRL News Today will repost all six of the winning essays from the 2022 NRLC Essay contest. Today we are posting the winning essay in the Senior Division, grades 10-12. The Junior Division is grades 7-9.
Why I am Pro-Life
Julianne J.
Pendleton OR
I am pro-life because I believe passionately in equal rights for all people. The preamble to the Declaration of Independence gives us this road map, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” Our rights do not originate from the government. They are given to us by the Creator. In the almost 250 years since this document was written, more and more people have had their God-given rights recognized and protected. However, there is one group that has not yet enjoyed such protection. This group is the unborn. The unborn are living human beings and are entitled to the “unalienable” rights described by the founders.
Unborn children are alive. This sentence is so simple as to seem redundant. Unborn children are alive. This can be proven scientifically because unborn children meet the criteria of living things (most commonly known as the eight characteristics for life). The unborn respond to their surroundings, they have cells and those cells have order, they grow by reproducing said cells, they maintain homeostasis (ex. body temperature), and through metabolism they turn nutrients into energy. They also possess the basic building blocks for the ability to reproduce and to pass on traits to offspring. An unborn baby exhibits every characteristic for life. Anyone with even a basic level of scientific instruction would tell you that the unborn are alive.
Another piece of evidence that unborn children are alive is that they have a heartbeat. The fetal heartbeat can be detected as early as the 5th or 6th week of pregnancy. The beating heart has been almost universally understood as a sign of life. Going as far back as Aristotle and other Greek philosophers, the heart was understood to be the source of life and the “inner self.”
In addition to being alive, unborn children are also human like the rest of us. The unborn, like all humans, share the same basic genetic makeup. Each one of us began as a growing fetus. We then progressed through the stages to become a baby, toddler, child, teen, and so on. To be unborn is a human stage of development.
I am pro-life because I believe the unborn (who are clearly alive and also clearly human beings) have claim upon the same rights that the Creator has given to all people. It is up to us to be the voice for our unborn siblings, to petition and protest on their behalf. We cannot sit idly by while these rights are being trampled. The greatest of these rights, the right that all other rights are built upon, is “Life”.