Choices

If I could, I would introduce everyone to my daughter Amy. Only she isn't my daughter, not really. Amy looks a lot like me and my family, she sounds a bit like me on the phone, she even has some of the same mannerisms. She is my daughter in that I gave birth to her 20 years ago. But she is even more Susan and Harry's daughter, they adopted her and raised her, they dried her tears, kissed her boo boo's and paid for her college. They are the ones who are eligible to write her off on their taxes. They get to hear Mom and Dad from her. I wouldn't have it any other way.

When I got pregnant with Amy, I was a senior in High School, 17 and not too excited to be procreating. I did not choose to get pregnant, I did, however, choose to have the sex that resulted in the pregnancy. I did at that time understand that sex is how most pregnancies occur, it wasn't surprising the way, say, opening a box of cereal to find a diamond ring would be surprising. Getting pregnant was part of the risk I took by making the choice.

Now in 1983 when I got pregnant, there were lots of choices to make. You got to choose if you wanted to abort or carry to term, then you got to choose whether you kept your baby or you gave your baby up. All the same choices available today. What we never get to do is choose what being pregnant means, it is always having within you the joined ovum and sperm that results first in an embryo and then a fetus. Now fetus always refers to, according to The American Heritage Dictionary, "the unborn young of a viviparous vertebrate; in humans, the unborn young from the end of the eighth week to the moment of birth as distinguished from the earlier embryo." Now in that same dictionary, embryo is defined as "An organism in its early stages of development, especially before it has reached a distinctively recognizable form." Unless it's a human, then the definition is this piece of partisan work "in man, the prefetal product of conception up to the beginning of the third month of pregnancy." Viviparous means "giving birth to live offspring that develop within the mother's body". What all these definitions mean, to get back to my point, is that in humans, pregnancy is ALWAYS carrying a baby in the womb. A human baby. That means that abortion, in humans, is ALWAYS killing a baby in the womb. A human baby. Just being clear.

32 years after the Supreme Court acted illegally as the legislative branch of our government and legalized abortion, millions of children are dead. One third of my daughter's graduating class never even got the chance to draw breath. Not even once. One third. Dead. Gone. Why? To give women choices, or to be blunt, to give women the choice to have sex and not consider or be responsible for the consequences. (BTW - Men are now much more able to act irresponsibly towards women since they are no longer held responsible for getting women pregnant. Woo Hoo, that's progress!) Yes, women get raped and get pregnant, it happens, now read this slowly, RARELY. Most abortions in this country are for convenience. Most abortions in the world are for convenience, unless you happen to live in a country that forces it's women to have abortions. The reasons given for having abortions are multiple, wrong time, wrong person, wrong sex. Unless you are in immediate danger of dying, abortion is always about what's convenient for the mother. There is no real consideration of the child. Not really.

Being pregnant for me wasn't convenient, it wasn't easy, it wasn't pleasant. Giving birth was painful and harsh. Leaving my newborn daughter in the hospital and going home without her was as painful as when my mother died. None of it was nice or clean, all of my choices after that one night were difficult and painful. 18 years of pain, missing her, praying that she was okay, never knowing what she looked like, never having other children to fill in the empty places only intensified that pain. I really do understand that these are hard choices, painful, costly choices.

Making worthy, hard choices are what make humans human, the part of us that is made in the image of God. We are separated from the beasts by being made in the image of God. That doesn't mean we are the only creatures to think, or to solve, or to feel. It means we are capable of reason. We image bearers carry within us the ability to make choices of self-sacrifice. Choosing to suffer so that another might live is a worthy choice. Amy understands this better than most people, she is very grateful that I chose her rather than me. So are Susan and Harry. So am I. I don't regret my pain, my loss, my heartache, not at all. How could I? She is a lively, funny, beautiful 20 year old college student who brings joy to her parents, brother & sister-in-law and friends. And to me, and I might add, to my family, who shockingly are not all anti-abortion even after they met Amy. They love her, to be sure, but I don't think they really understand that there were so very many children like Amy, lovely, wonderful, smart, funny, children, who died because it was inconvenient for them to live.

There are so many other reasons that abortion is always a bad choice, social reasons, health of the woman reasons, even feminist reasons. Did you know that the incidence of breast cancer is significantly higher in women who have had abortions? Did you know that the abortion industry is unregulated? That should scare you. A lot. Did you know that your twelve year old child can get an abortion in many states without your permission? Major surgery, possibly life threatening surgery, can be performed on your twelve, 12, year old child all without your permission or knowledge. She can't get her ears pierced at the mall without you, but she can kill your grandchild and you never even get to know. Many, many women have long term physical effects from abortions, in legal clinics, infections, perforations, excessive bleeding, even death. The emotional and mental effects last the rest of their life. Here is another little fact: Significantly more than 50% of the babies aborted in the world are female, women are killing women to be more acceptable to men. And not just in India or China.

There are many reasons abotion is a bad choice, but the most important reason is that abortion kills a child, an innocent baby who so far hasn't made any choices at all. Not a potential child, not the product of conception, a human, seperate and distinct from the mother and father. Abortion is the cold blooded murder of a baby.

God forgive us, we know what it is we do.

Satellite Photos of Tsunami Damage

http://homepage.mac.com/demark/tsunami/9.html

This link will take you to some sobering pictures of the damage. It's all before and after pictures of the areas most affected by the Indian Ocean Tsunami.

Some of these places look scoured, villages wiped clean of all living things and their belongings.

Inexplicable Nature

The full horror and scope of loss of the Christmas Earthquake and Tsunami's are a long way from being realized. The numbers are just too high to imagine and the sorrow attached to numbers is meaningless because we just can't wrap our heads around it. Unless you have lost a loved one yourself, or several, but to lose 30 or 40 family members, plus half your town AND your home in one day is unimaginable to us in the west.

Or it would be if nature didn't keep plodding it's way through the world and our lives. Yesterday I watched the images from California of floods and mudslides and read the stories of loss. Of course, the damage in Cali is on a much smaller scale, and we have the onsite resources to rescue the injured and trapped. Our infrastructure is such that we are able to still send help and our country is at peace so that aid workers need not worry about rebels shooting them. Even in the midst of a terrible disaster we still are so much better off than so many other places in the world.

I would submit however, that the California man searching desperately for his wife and children beneath the rubble of a mudslide and the Indonesian man searching desperately for his wife and children under the rubble of an earthquake and tsunami have significantly more in common than any differences they may have. They are both gripped by grief, fear, horror for what their loved ones may have endured and a dying hope for their safe return. Their arms ache to hold their babies again. They are both going through a loss that is more than they can bear.

The aftermath of the California floods and mudslides will be relatively short, it will be quickly cleaned up and we will move on. The Asian countries will have a longer clean up, and they won't be able to move on as quickly. Entire towns are gone, many are missing too many people to continue, and so the town will die shortly after many of it's residents died. In a few years these things will be remembered, more sharply by some, less so by others. Wait a few decades, there will be legends and stories, our memories will grow dim. That is how we are, humans that is.

If that were not so we would all be huddled in a small space in the middle of Germany refusing to go anywhere. Are there not villages on the slopes of Pompeii? Is California still home to the priciest real estate in the USA? People still live on Japan's islands, build homes in the Mississippi Flood Plains, and start towns in the Turkish provinces prone to earthquakes. Those places will be inhabited again, maybe not for centuries, but they will.

But today the pain is still unimaginable.