“Parents instinctively know there is a life growing inside of the mother when they find out she is pregnant. Saying otherwise is intellectually and emotionally dishonest.”
Early in our marriage, my wife and I experienced a miscarriage within weeks of finding out that she was pregnant. What was unbelievable joy at the prospect of being a father turned to sorrow over the course of a single night.
It hit me hard. The loss I felt was overwhelming. My soul grieved, not only for my wife and I but for that child I so wanted to hold and share my life with.
When they learned the news, some well-meaning friends and family, even ministers, attempted to assuage the obvious grief I couldn’t hide, saying things like, “It’s OK. Y’all can try again,” or, “Better that it happened now than later in the pregnancy.”
While I knew what they said came from a sincere place of concern, trying to help me see beyond the sadness of the day, those words only made me angry and irritated at the time.
“Did they not know that that was my child?”
“I don’t want to try again. I want my baby.”
Still today, over 20 years and two other healthy children later, I often think of what that baby could have been. He or she is still my child. I knew it from the moment the pregnancy was confirmed. My heart yearns to know him or her even as I write this, and I pray one glorious day in Heaven I get to meet that soul I have loved since that day I first knew it was in the womb.
Let’s put aside the political, scientific, or religious talking points that only muddy the debate. You don’t need a doctor, scientist, pastor or activist to tell you what you already innately know: sex can produce a child, a life. In fact, that is the prevailing purpose.
Parents instinctively know there is a life growing inside of the mother when they find out she is pregnant. Saying otherwise is intellectually and emotionally dishonest.
When you hear you or your partner is pregnant, there is a weight of reality that floods your very being because you know full well there is a life you are now responsible for, a life you helped create – intentionally or not.
If not for that reality, that responsibility for another life, there would be no argument for abortion. The fact that the unborn life takes up space in this world and causes its parents concern, whether joyfully or in angst, is a true testament of that life’s existence.
Abortion, then, favors the parents’ momentary whims and neglectfully ignores the unborn life’s permanent place in the world, even if that life is ended before it emerges from the womb.
Abortion does not nullify the baby’s existence; it confirms it.
Abortion may end the responsibility on behalf of the parents, but those parents intrinsically know and are inherently aware of that child’s presence, no matter if that child lives or dies. That baby, that life exists and persists.
With the U.S. Supreme Court set to hear oral arguments on Mississippi’s 15-week abortion ban law, it is the first real opportunity to right a wrong handed down nearly 50 years ago in Roe v. Wade by a political system that is fundamentally out of step with what each of us know instinctively on the most basic human level. Roe has allowed millions to justify a lifestyle devoid of responsibilities while condoning the killing of over 60 million lives largely out of want for selfish convenience on the part of the parents.
While I would like to see abortion ruled unconstitutional and criminal penalties placed on that practice, I am realistic when it comes to this republic we hold dear. Politics, science and religion do play a role in such debates, if for nothing more than to seek to overly justify self-serving positions on either side. As such, it is my hope and prayer that the Justices uphold Mississippi’s right to enact abortion bans, and that the Court sends these decisions back to the states where they rightly belong.
America cannot be a land of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for all persons if we deny those constitutionally recognized God-given rights to each of His children, whether born or unborn.
