Amendment 48

Kristi Burton is a home-schooled teenager who has successfully gotten an amendment onto the November ballot. She is quite religious and feels that this is her calling from God. Colorado is going to be a test state in the never ending war against Roe vs Wade and abortion rights.

The amendment states that at the moment of conception the fertilized embryo becomes a person. What is inferred but not stated is that the instant of conception is sacred and to kill that person is murder, which will be the next step if this amendment is passed.

The hypocrisy here is that conception is sacred only for humans. Because if the moment of conception is sacred, it is sacred for all beings. To eat meat or kill any animal would also be murder, and is more in line with Buddhism than Christianity. Since we know that even plants show fear and can "scream," you cannot live on this earth without doing some kind of violence.

But more important for humans is the soul, which is a separate thing from our bodies and leaves us when we die. It allows us to transcend our animal state and become aware. No attempt is made to determine at what instant the soul enters the body, and this omission is why this amendment should not be allowed to pass. 

I grew up in a middle class neighborhood in Southern California, and when I was a kid there were girls who got pregnant and almost killed themselves trying to abort with a sharpened coat-hanger or swallowing quarts of castor oil. I certainly don't want our society to return to those tactics. Killing by self mutilation, and the psychic scars that go with it is not worth it compared to more modern abortion techniques. It is not a comfortable decision to ever make, and the body will always grieve for what has been lost, and the real Christian thing to do is to help these girls heal from that experience.

-yiquan