The Sad Anniversary

If one seeks the silver lining in the dark cloud that is abortion in the US, it might be the fact that over fifty million souls have been added to the rolls of Heaven since this date in 1973. That’s my take on it theologically; I believe human life begins at conception, and I believe innocent children are ushered immediately into God’s presence when they are taken from earth. I know it’s a stretch to find anything good resulting from the holocaust that Roe v. Wade initiated, but it is something.

What really puzzles me is how the same people who shed tears over baby seals being slaughtered or polar bears suffering due to global warming can blithely advocate for the “right” of a woman to end the existence of a living being that cannot become anything but a human being if natural processes are allowed to continue. Even if we agree to disagree about when human life begins, and if we accept for purposes of argument that all sentient creatures are equal, that would seem to place the fetus in a category worthy of protection? Apparently not. I like Ronald Reagan’s comment: “Everybody who is for abortion has already been born.”

Then there is the more direct parallel between what many abortion advocates think about situations where “terrorists” slaughter innocents and the wholesale slaughter of unborn infants by abortion. The number of deaths by abortion would dwarf the number of people killed by Al qaeda and ISIL and Boko Haram combined. Not even Hitler and Stalin together killed more innocents than abortion has since 1973. I know abortion advocates would not accept my parallel since they have convinced themselves that a fetus is not a human being. That is nothing but a mind-trick they play on themselves. For some it soothes their conscience.

For others, not so much. This crowd has closed their eyes to the millions of women who have followed their encouragement to have an abortion of choice, and who afterward struggle mightily with emotional and psychological trauma. Or consider the women’s rights lobby that decries the treatment of women under various harsh regimes around the world, yet fails to consider that the basic right of life has been denied to twenty to thirty million fetuses that would have become women had abortion not been so prevalent here at home.

I shudder when I read of the ancient Israelites abandoning Jehovah for the worship of the Phoenician god, Molech, which included infant sacrifice as part of the ceremonial rights. What god have fifty million women bowed to in the last four decades since Roe v. Wade opened the door to abortion access in the US? Many of the pro-abortion arguments end up being about convenience. Ultimately the rationale sounds eerily similar to the motivation for sacrificing a child to Molech to “ensure financial prosperity for the family and future children.” We moderns may not be as different from the ancients as we presume.