Dead Babies

I had an interesting and challenging conversation with an old friend from high school this past week. She was upset by the latest legislature concerning planned parenthood and deferring the option of funding to the states once again. The original statement she made was concerning death rates from pregnancy in the United States and how abortion was a needful option for these women who had no other recourse than death. This is a reason for legal abortion in her estimation.

I pressed back, saying medically necessary abortion has always been legal and that’s not what planned parenthood is primarily concerned with. She became emotionally reactive saying I didn’t know what it was like to have a mental condition that required medication that would cause birth defects in the baby. That to have to go through the pain of the mental condition because you are forced to follow through with a pregnancy that you don’t want was unfair.

I pressed again, saying I did, in fact, know what it was like to have to balance a mental condition and pregnancy. That all medications are not counter indicated in pregnancy. And that there is birth control options available for people who really don’t want to risk having a baby under other than favorable conditions. She began to get frustrated and said there are so many children waiting to be adopted that there’s no reason children need to be born that are really unwanted.

This one finally really got to me as a foster mother who has never gotten a placement who wants nothing more than to adopt a baby that is not available. There are tons of kids waiting for adoption! But, they are almost entirely older children and all have special needs which our social workers could not approve in our home with younger kids.

I agree that death should not be the punishment for having sex. Sex in itself is not wrong. Death is regularly a repercussion for irresponsibility, and a child should not have to pay the price for a parents irresponsibility. Why is the woman’s right to chose more important than a child’s right to live?

This is a conversation rehashed over and over again, and yet those who claim to be open minded and followers of science and reason can disregard the serious ethical ramifications of this issue. They have tried to make this prettier by calling the babies zygotes, or the bigger ones fetuses. They have tried to undertake the addressing of the necessary questions by outlining when real life begins. When a person becomes a person. But I don’t know how you ignore the loss and pain a woman feels when the life that was once in her ceases to be. The guilt that they couldn’t help the little one that was relying on her to make it in this terrible world. And it’s not just the women like me that have lost a wanted child to miscarriage that feel that way. There are the unspoken hordes of women like my mother who terminated an unwanted pregnancy and then wept over the loss the rest of her life. There is a beautiful mystery to giving life that we cannot just ignore in our quest for scientific knowledge, or the quest to have the same rights as men. Lets remember and weep for the losses we have caused either by our blatant disregard of the responsibility God has given us, or by not taking a stand for those that cannot defend themselves.

This is an issue we all become a little jaded toward because it’s happening all around us every day. But that didn’t excuse the Israelites, or the Corinthians who were surrounded by corruption. We are to be set apart to God as holy, so let us not resemble the evil around us. As our culture becomes increasingly complicated how do we succeed in this? What kind of ramifications does social networking and the corporate world bring to the mix? What are the thoughts? How do we have the aroma of Christ in the world of today?