In response to my column last week explaining that I weigh
abortion as the single most important issue when considering who to vote for in
an election, I was told that maybe my mother should have aborted me. I wish I
was joking, but I’m not. This person suggested that my mother, after I had
already began forming in my mother’s womb (“Before I formed you in the womb I
knew you” Jeremiah 1:5a), should have gone to a doctor’s office or Planned
Parenthood Center to have me torn apart or cut out or whatever barbaric way
they do it now, so that my life would end and I would cease to be. Why did this
person suggest such a thing? Well, because in my column I had suggested that a
woman should NOT have society’s permission and blessing to go to a doctor’s
office or Planned Parenthood Center after conceiving her baby and then have
them tear the baby apart or cut the baby out. By advocating for an unborn baby,
I became the recipient of such outrage and hatred. Triggered is what the kids
call it these days, I believe.
Let me once again explain why I believe abortion to be such an important issue.
In doing so, I realize I might cause a ruckus, but Jesus blessed the children
and showed us how valuable they are to Him, and God chose to include for us in
the Bible an instance where John the Baptist, still in his mother’s womb, leapt
when Mary, carrying Jesus in her womb, entered a room, so I believe any such
ruckus-causing is in good company and makes practical sense.
Anyway, the reason I stand so passionately for the unborn children is because I
believe God does as well. That is always my starting point. Now, I could base
my stance here simply on emotional experience. While I have never had an
abortion myself (of course) and have never been part of that kind of decision
for my own child, I have driven a friend to get an abortion and given her
emotional support. Even as a non-Christian, that rattled me, especially as I
was the only one who could console my friend during several breakdowns that
followed her abortion- she hadn’t even told her boyfriend she was pregnant.
Eventually, Charlene dropped out of school and moved back home, and I lost
track of her, but even today I often wonder how her life ended up. It was such
an impressionable moment on me that as an English major at Radford, I wrote a
poem about that incident in a Poetry Writing class. Yes, I could say that that
experience has influenced my stance on abortion, but it wasn’t until I was born
again at 28 years and 11 months old that I became the obnoxious, loud-mouthed
defender of a baby’s right to be born that I am today.
I could also go with the logic I sometimes hear, good logic in a way, that we
never know who it is a woman is aborting- perhaps the one who would cure AIDS
or cancer, the one who would have saved someone’s life, the next Martin Luther
King, Jr. or Mother Teresa. That does cause one to think and wonder about all
the potentially wonderful people that have been killed inside their mother’s
womb. That argument falls short for me though, because I believe ALL children’s
lives are equally important and that ALL children have the right to be born,
regardless of whether they achieve greatness, turn out to be a true villain or
end up just living a boring, ordinary life.
At the end of the day, I am against abortion because I read Scripture and see
how it is God who “knit us together in our mother’s womb,” (Psalm 139), how God
is our God even while in our mother’s womb (Psalm 22), how God chose when we’d
be born and where (Acts 17), how He made us in His own image (Genesis 1) and
how God hates the person who sheds innocent blood (Proverbs 6). I am convinced
that God hates abortion and, therefore, I hate abortion. I do not hate the
person who has one or the person who is pro-choice (many are my good friends),
but I can’t get away from hating the act itself. If that makes me an enemy of
the people, so much so that they’d wish that I had been aborted myself, so be
it.