A talk from 41 years ago, but it still very very important, especially as how, in many quarters, the life of the unborn is diminished greatly if not outright denied:
Some say, as did the Supreme Court of the United States, that it is only a theory that human life is present from conception. This is contrary to insurmountable medical evidence. Dr. Bernard N. Nathanson recently revealed that he was among those who were militantly outspoken in favor of legalized abortion and joined in using every device available in political action to promote it. He helped set up and became director of the first and largest abortion clinic in the western world. After the center had performed some sixty thousand abortions, Dr. Nathanson resigned as director. He said, “I am deeply troubled by my own increasing certainty that I had in fact presided over 60,000 deaths. There is no longer serious doubt in my mind that human life exists within the womb from the very onset of pregnancy.” (New England Journal of Medicine, vol. 291, no. 22, p. 1189.)
Way back in the sixteenth century, Arantius showed that maternal and fetal circulations were separate, thus clearly demonstrating that there are two separate lives involved. The unborn babe is certainly alive, because it possesses the token of life which is the ability to reproduce dying cells. (Dr. Eugene F. Diamond, Illinois Medical Journal, May 1967.)
For the unborn, only two possibilities are open: It can become a live human being or a dead unborn child.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, referring to the unborn babe in the mother’s womb, said, “The simple fact is that God certainly intended to create a human being.”
Because she feels it, every mother knows there is sacred life in the body of her unborn babe. There is also life in the spirit, and some time before birth the body and the spirit are united. When they do come together, we have a human soul. For the Lord has said, “And the spirit and the body are the soul of man.” (D&C 88:15.)
Experts tell us that the necessity of terminating unborn life is rarely justified for purely medical or psychiatric reasons. (Dr. James H. Ford, M.D., California Medical Journal, Nov. 1972, pp. 80–84.) Some justify abortions because the unborn may have been exposed to drugs or disease and may have birth defects. Where in all the world is the physically or mentally perfect man or woman? Is life not worth living unless it is free of handicaps? Experience in working with handicapped children would suggest that human nature frequently rises above its impediments and that in Shakespeare’s words, “They say best men are molded out of faults, And, for the most, become much more the better For being a little bad” (Measure for Measure, 5, i, 445) in the physical sense. (transcript)
