A Winning Speech: "Let America's Prenatal Children Live"

The following is the winning speech in a pro-life speech contest for college students cosponsored by Flint, Michigan Area Right to Life and Black Americans for Life.

It was delivered by Harrison Glenn, 19, a Delta College freshman. He is the son of Gary and Annette Glenn. Harrison's father, Gary, is President of the American Family Association of Michigan and a Sunlit Uplands correspondent.

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By Harrison Glenn

I've met some amazing women in my life. My mother was the first, with special other ones thereafter. But no matter how amazing, none of them have had two heads or four eyes.

But abortion activists like attorney Lori Andrews would have you think otherwise. When talking about pregnant women and their prenatal children, Lori Andrews said “people's body parts are their personal property."

In other words, she said, a pregnant woman does have two sets of body parts -- hers and her “fetus’s."

Does it matter if she’s right? Of course it does, especially to the baby.

Here’s just one way it matters: pain.

When we see someone else get hurt, it doesn't cause us pain, and likewise, during an abortion, a woman may not feel physical pain when her “second set” of body parts are ripped from her, but someone does. The baby does.

Abraham Lincoln once said: "As I would not be a slave, I would not be a master; for I would not choose for others, what I would not choose for myself."

Lincoln also said: “Whenever I hear anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him.”

And so it is with abortion. How many women who have had abortions would choose for themselves the “choice” they chose for their baby?

How many would choose themselves to be ripped apart, limb from limb, while their heart is still beating, aware of and feeling all that is occurring?

How many would choose to die an agonizing death in a vat of acid, which is what a saline abortion feels like to a prenatal child, or have their consciousness, their very minds sucked from their skulls, aware of and feeling it all til the last moment, as in a partial birth abortion?

My name is Harrison Glenn, and I am a survivor of the "pro-choice" era, one of the greatest tragedies on American soil. I am a survivor because my Mom and my Dad did not buy into the lie, because my Mom and Dad believed I had a God-given right to life.

Unlike 40 million of my generation’s never-born brothers and sisters, I have been given the chance to live life to the fullest, to see the sun set, to learn, grow, and fall in love.

And still, despite irrefutable scientific proof, abortion activists either argue illogically and unscientifically that life does not begin at conception…

…or argue immorally, as John Kerry did, that life does begin but it doesn’t matter if our laws allow that life to be snuffed out.

Such people, empowered by our courts, have denied more than forty million prenatal children the chance to live.

It is an irrefutable scientific, medical, biological, moral, and spiritual fact that human life begins at conception.

Still, many argue irrationally that an embryonic prenatal child, especially in its earliest stages of life, is not human. But let us think about this rationally and logically.

What kind of life is the embryonic prenatal child? Is it rabbit life? Vegetable life? Maybe bird life? No, the last time I checked I don’t have feathers.

It is a human life.

Others claim abortion is good to ensure that no child grows up in an abusive home. "Every child a wanted child," they say.

They suggest that if a family can have the "correct" amount of children at the "proper" times, then these family problems will be eliminated. No more child abuse, no more children that are not "wanted" will be born.

"Eliminating" the lives of prenatal children does not lessen child abuse. Brutally and painfully ending their lives is the ultimate child abuse.

In fact, according to doctors, 90 percent of all abused children are those that were wanted at birth. Abortion does not save children from growing up in abusive homes, it “saves” them from growing up at all! This is a “good” thing, they argue.

But Abraham Lincoln answers once again, regarding another great moral and social issue over which our great, great, great grandparents fought and even died, over another “good” in which some people thought they could exercise “choice” over the lives of other human beings:

“As a good thing, slavery is strikingly peculiar in this, that it is the only good thing which no man ever seeks the good of, for himself!”

So it is with abortion.

Still, I do believe in a woman's right to choose -- a right to choose whether to remain celibate.

Nearly every woman who ever had an abortion first made a choice to engage in behavior that might result in the creation of a prenatal child. A woman does not spontaneously generate a child. Some thought was involved in the process, and certainly some action.

For that less than one percent of all abortions in which the woman's choice was violently and criminally violated, the solution to that first wrong is not a second and even greater wrong -- to kill the innocent prenatal child because of the sins of its father.

The solution is to do all we can to prevent it from ever happening again, through harsher penalties for rape, or other methods.

As I said, a woman does not have two hearts, four eyes, two noses, four ears.

A baby is not just a part of a woman, nor a parasite, any more than any human being is a parasite on others just because we depend on each other.

Every human being is dependent in some way on others. You require the farmer's milk and food, the miner's steel, the autoworker’s car. You needed your mother as a prenatal child and beyond to survive, but did that dependence and your location make you somehow less human? No.

Finally, let's choose to be honest about what these procedures really are -- a partial birth, but total death, experience. And such a heinous procedure -- this partial birth, total death, abortion -- is not partially wrong. It is totally wrong.

We cannot stand by. The time to reclaim the birthright of all Americans, including America’s prenatal children, is now.

You see, life is not just a beautiful choice. In the eyes and laws of God, it is, and some day again under the laws of man, should be, the only choice.

I urge you to position yourself and take a stand against abortion.

Listen to the words of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.:

"On some positions, cowardice asks the question, is it expedient? And then expedience comes along and asks the question, is it politic? Vanity asks the question, is it popular? Conscience asks the question, is it right? There comes a time when one must take the position that is neither safe nor politic nor popular, but he must do it because conscience tells him it is right."

I agree.

Now is the time, and conscience tells us it is right -- right to let America’s prenatal children live.