Wednesday, January 22, 2003

What Of Our Humanity?

Thirty years ago today, the Supreme Court of the United States (otherwise known affectionately as "the High Court") decided that, since it could not be determined when life began in the womb, an unborn child could be presumed not to have the right to life and liberty accorded under the laws of this land, never mind those of Nature Herself. So the child was presumed guilty until proven innocent. The decision was also based upon a deception, since the story employed by "Jane Roe" (aka Norma McCorvey) to make her case proved to be fabricated.

Three decades have passed, and forty million children have died. We are shocked by the horror that was "9/11," and yet such horror occurs every day, quietly, in "health clinics" across the USA. If a child is emerging from the womb, a doctor can take a pair of scissors and gorge its brains out, and call it "terminating a pregnancy." Once the child has left the womb, the same procedure is known as "infanticide." So the unwanted child is left in the womb partially, long enough to do the evil deed. Hence the term "partial-birth abortion."

Most women who procure abortions would just as soon not. They are backed into a corner, often by their boyfriends, husbands, or fathers. They turn to places run mostly by men, who profit from their pain. This writer has heard countless stories of women turned away from clinics at the sidewalks, by sincere individuals willing to put themselves on the line, in offering an alternative.

A friend of mine once told me of how he and his wife decided they could never bring a child into a world like it is today. But since when has the world NOT been a terrible place, in one form or another? Could that one child make the difference to someone in that world someday?

My only son, the product of a "broken home," has made a difference in my life. For all my success in the world, my single greatest contribution to humanity, is a seventeen-year-old, highly creative, wise-cracking, recovering alcoholic from Fairfax County, Virginia. If I never marry again, this will be my legacy -- God's gift to me, my gift to the world. Even the great gospel singer Ethel Waters was conceived as the result of a rape. God lifted her out of tragedy into a voice that would praise His name in this world, and God willing, the next.

Can anything good come out of suffering? It often does, given the chance for God to proceed with His will. And millions will converge on the Nation's capital to say "Yes" to that choice. I have marched with them in the past, mothers with babes in arms, college students singing songs of virtue and glory, brave men and women who have known the darkness of a prison cell, for the crime of demanding freedom of the innocent. They are righteous in their anger, peaceful in their demeanor, and one day, they shall prevail.

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