If violence breeds more of the same, then 17 years of legalized abortion in Canada has played a definite role in the increase of teenage suicides in our country according to Dr. Harry A. Nielsen, professor of philosophy here at the University of Windsor.
Professor Nielsen was addressing a group of university students February 10 on the direct relation between growing up in an abortion society and the dramatic increase in teenage suicides over the last 17 years.
He pointed out that in the back of the minds of every teenager today, either consciously or unconsciously, loom these disturbing thoughts: “Yes, here I am at he age of seventeen, but not because I have any intrinsic right to exist. Nobody conceived in this land after 1969 had that right.”
Professor Nielson said that he used no references to backup his claims, because “statistics on young people coming of age in our abortion society are only starting to come in.” Instead, he made the following assertions:
– teenagers growing up in an abortion society are confused about the value of human life.
– suicide as self-abortion – under the usual pressures of the teen years, a person growing up in an abortion society stumbles sooner or later on the thought, “I can always abort myself.”
He explained that “for the most part, teenagers are unhardened; they still posses their original sense of the insulting, revolting, the horrible.” Consequently, present society are in for some pain and bewilderment” when they consider that no value is placed on an unborn child unless that child is wanted by its parents.
Professor Nielsen doesn’t downplay the role of alcohol or narcotics abuse, nor does he see the abortion mentality as “anything more than a factor in tripling of teenage suicides” in the last 30 years. Nevertheless, when asked why he emphasized the abortion society as a main factor in teen suicides when everyone knows that kids today are haunted by the threat of nuclear war, Professor Nielsen responded, “. . . nuclear war is a possibility and we’ve all heard debates on how likely or unlikely a possibility it is. However, the abortion society has been an actuality for seventeen years, chalk up mega deaths by separate on-on-one acts of violence.”
Nielsen sees the present dilemma in our society as “a sickness that has to run its course,” consequently, he predicts that “things will get worse before they get better.”
Despite the present situation, however, Professor Nielsen believes that there is hope, and that the first of all, we must begin by getting the message across to teenagers that “a human life … remain an incomparable gift.”
Mark Kahabka is a philosophy undergraduate at the University of Windsor.
