REFLECTIONS

For most of my adult life being pro-life was an intellectual choice.  I could clearly see what the “culture of death” had wrought in our soiciety.  It seemed so clear that we were raising young people with no respect for human life and we were paying the price with the skyrocketing murder rates in our country.  My concern was what legalized abortion had done for we the living, not for the ones whose life ended before they drew their first breath. 

That changed the day I fell hopelessly, madly, eternally in love with my son; he was minus 7 months old.   That is too say I was 8 weeks pregnant.   My son was that proverbial blob of cells with no rights and according to our soiciety no value.   I saw him on the sonogram, didn’t even know if he was a he.  What I thought was his head was a yolk sack.   He could, as PJ O’Rourke once poetically put it, “fit in a coke spoon”.   But there was this tiny flickering light in the center of the tiny blob.  I knew at once what it was but I asked anyway and the doctor confirmed that was my baby’s heartbeat.  I can’t even tell you what that felt like.  I had this overwhelming rush of bliss and love for that tiny flickering light and intense longing to hold that tiny life in my arms.  That heartbeat was the greatest moment of my life, to that point.  I would have a million more with that little heart.  But I will never forget that first moment and all the love and happiness that little boy brought me, long before the Supremem Court recognized his humanity.

My pro-life convinctions changed at the moment from a mere intellectual excercise to far more passionate belief.  I saw so clearly the madness that infects a country where sonograms are cherished and loved; and Roe V Wad is considred a sacred right.  I saw the impolitic cruelty of dividing those heartbeats into the ones that live and the ones that die.