(Originally posted May 16, 2022)
I was 16 when the Roe v. Wade decision was handed down in 1973. In my sheltered naivete, I was horrified to learn of it, and the act of abortion itself. Instantly, my nearly completely uninformed mind was taught by my Heavenly Father these facts:
Abortion was wrong because it took the life of a human being.
Abortion was wrong because it gave the illusion it was possible to escape the consequences of choices already made.
I'm not here to discuss the 'buts'. It has never been wise to make policy based on exceptions.
I was both moved and sobered to hear Mother Teresa speak at the National Prayer Breakfast in early 1994 on the topic of abortion.
Moved, because she pleaded with mothers who didn't want their unborn babies: "Give them to me; I want them."
Sobered - chilled, actually - when she presciently warned: "A society that will kill its own children will stop at nothing to get what it wants."
Nearly 50 years after trying to federalize legal abortions - wrongly so according to even Ruth Bader Ginsburg - and 30 years after Mother Teresa spoke, her latter statement can be grimly tested and measured.
I can't wrap my head around the compartmentalization of thinking that allows a woman to kill her unborn baby - not her body - if she doesn't want the baby, but allows the same woman to celebrate the pregnancy and possibility of a new life if she does. What a disturbing denial of reality. It would seem the spiritual war waging today isn't against God only, but against reality itself.
I can't wrap my head around having grown up in a world where it was absolutely understood that an unborn baby was a life, only to now live in a world where this is hotly, and far too often rabidly, debated.
It's as if the entire world is a delusional little child, determined to have its cake and eat it too, remonstrating against the hand of God and reality. It's as if there is an actual hand before its collective face. And while the world can writhe back and forth like the screaming child - "NO! NO! NO!" - when exhaustion finally causes the exhausted child to fall still and quiet, the hand of God and reality are still right there, before the face of the child - still being God - still being real.
What is real?
It is a baby. Killers wouldn't be convicted for double homicide for killing a pregnant mother if it weren't.
It is a baby. They wouldn't be harvesting its organs - as close to birth as possible for more perfect, better-priced specimens - if it weren't.
It is a baby. The most vociferous voices wouldn't be at this frenzied pitch if it weren't.
It is a baby. Sixty million of them have been murdered. There is absolutely nothing safe or rare about that.
For today, let's not pettifog out of this problem by talking about the other problems of neglected children, irresponsible parenting, cruelty, abuse, and abandonment. Enlightened societies need to deal with those real problems as well.
For today, let's work to move this society to this first step back from the darkest abyss of the loss of law and order, which comes in a society that will stop at nothing to get what it wants.
For today, let's work to make this implacable reality - reality again.
It is a baby.
AMEN