Our local newspaper is running articles about states passing “draconian anti-abortion laws” – pushing the panic button that women will have no rights, their bodies “kidnapped”. Seventy high school students cut classes and marched to the town square to raise their signs. PRO F****** CHOICE. NO FORCED BIRTH. TRUST WOMEN. This morning the editorial section filled half a page with “Antiabortion Laws Let Father Off the Hook” in which the writer refers to men as “impregnators”. I felt her anguish seething between lines. Her father impregnated her mother and left shortly after her birth. He didn’t send child support and signed over his rights so that she could be adopted by her stepfather. He showed up at her mother’s funeral. He gave her business card with his phone number and an invitation. How dare he? She used social media to research his family.
Sadly, what never occurred to her is her mother chose life. She is a living, breathing human being because her mother didn’t end a crisis pregnancy. What never occurred to her is the regret her father might have felt, and why he offered an invitation to become a part of his life. She never heard his side of the story.
People repent. God forgives.
It grieves my soul what shapes the hearts and souls of so many women, filling them with hate. The ferocious faces, obscene signs and fingers in the air to anyone Pro-Life.
The fact is any woman who becomes pregnant is a mother. She is carrying a human being inside her. She becomes caregiver to that life from the moment of conception. The question is: What sort of mother will she decide to be?
It’s so easy to buy into the lie. I know I did and suffered for it. Do women go back to abortion providers and ask for help dealing with physical side effects or PTSD caused by “the easy solution”? What about the men who want the child conceived, and would be willing to be single parents – but have no rights over the life they started?
In our local paper was another article about the fear of harming an endangered frog species. Work has been halted in clearing debris and rebuilding 800 homes lost in the fire in Paradise. Not long ago, retrofitting a bridge over which tens of thousands of people passed every day was halted until a hummingbird egg hatched and the baby flew the nest.
And I can’t help but wonder. If animal life is important enough to protect, why isn’t human life? Do we really believe that each and every human being has an equal right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness? Or is that right only for some?
If it’s wrong to hurt people because of skin color or gender, why is it acceptable to hurt them because they are smaller, placed somewhere, and helpless? Perhaps it is true that the most dangerous place on earth is in the womb of a woman.
Every time I hear the arguments used for abortion, I fear how they can be applied to every life – from the womb to the infirmed, disabled, and aged.