[Today’s run: Limerock Road, 4 miles]
I’ve been thinking about this some more in the past few days and it may not be completely formulated yet, so bear with me a bit.
Many states now have laws, variously called the ‘castle doctrine’ or ‘make-my-day’ laws. If a homeowner is on her own property and someone breaks in or attacks, that homeowner can use deadly force to stop the intrusion.
One night you are lying in bed when you hear a noise. Someone is in your house. You slip out of bed and pull a shotgun out from under the dresser. You put the safety off. Quietly you creep down the hall. There’s someone over by the front door. You wonder if you forgot to lock the door last night. It goes through your mind that if you shoot someone it’s going to be a lot of trouble. Just think of the mess to clean up! And you know you are going to have to explain this to a lot of people. You see someone moving, over by the lamp. He’s got a knife, something shiny. You raise the gun and aim.
You’re a young woman of child-bearing age. Maybe you forgot to lock the front door, maybe not, it doesn’t matter now. There’s a baby in your body and whatever happens there’s a whole lot of explaining to do. According to the laws of our land you have the choice to kill it. It’s going to be messy and painful and it may ruin your life. Or… you can let it grow and eventually come forth: It will be messy and painful and it may ruin your life.
I agree with the pro-life position that the baby is a separate human being and deserves respect. Nobody asked the baby whether he or she wanted you. So you are both in this place together, a place of fear and uncertainty. But you’re the mom and you have the power and the choice. Your first big decision as a mom: whether the baby will live.
And I’m pro-choice. You are allowed to make wrong choices. I don’t know of anybody that wants to send mothers to jail. So you are not going to go to jail. With either choice you’ll have some explaining to do, and it will be bloody and painful and it may ruin your life.
I’m pro-baby. I like babies. They are the future. I wish we had more of them, not less. In one state where I lived, they passed a law that any mother who was overwhelmed could take her baby to a fire station and leave it with the firemen. No jail, no “unfit mother”, none of that. I think that is a good idea. But, I also think that you’ll like having a baby. Babies are like puppies except they are more real. In addition to biting and pooping, babies eventually walk and talk and turn into little people. Then big people. Maybe even people you might like.
There used to be a commercial on TV when I was a kid. An elderly black woman, in an office building or public building, down on the floor on her hands and knees scrubbing the floor. And the story was about how she scrubbed the floor so her children could go to college. It might be nicer to be the kid going to college, maybe. If you have a baby you might be the one scrubbing the floor. But if you don’t have a baby, there’s nobody to scrub the floor for. I’m Pro-Baby. I think it is probably worth scrubbing the floor if you can put your baby through college.
But what if your baby has Down’s Syndrome or some other problem? What if it’s a girl and you wanted a boy? (Some people kill the runt in a litter of dogs.) I’m Pro-Baby, I think every one of them has something I like.
The best thing you can do for your baby is to have a stable household with a mother and father, lots of time together, good medical care, safety from all the troubles of the world. But most babies don’t get all of that and they seem to do mostly ok, particularly if they stick together. Your situation might be the two of you on your own and have to have a stranger baby-sit while you work 20 hours a day. I’m still Pro-Baby.
In the final extreme, maybe you’ll need to have someone else care for your baby, give her a good home, more than you can do. I’m Pro-Baby. Bring on the baby.
So, here you are and now there’s a screaming baby boy on the living room floor with a “Happy New Year!” banner on his chest and you are standing there holding the shotgun. What are you going to do?
4 replies on “Pro-Baby”
“Every child a wanted child.”
Female abortion and infanticide by the millions happen in India and China (I read an estimate of 13,000,000 total abortions a year in China) yet the issue doesn’t have traction in the West. I would think pro-life, feminists, and human right groups would step up to leverage a change. A coalition of factions that identify with both the right and left.
A few decades ago the West, both governments and citizens, effectively put pressure on South Africa to change their domestic policy called apartheid. If 1/3rd the folks in America boycotted Chinese goods would it change their one child policy, at least on the margins?
Sidebar: President Bush was the first (only) sitting president to attend an olympics not held in the US. Given the political system and policies of the nation he chose, it doesn’t make sense to me.
I agree about India and China.
I don’t like the “Every child a wanted child” slogan because it was
morphed in action as “only children that are wanted.” All children
are valuable and good. The lack of “wanting” is a transgression in the adults.
I am pro-life. But I recognize that these lives are not in my hands.
Someone is given the power of life or death and that person, in our
society, is the mother.
I was raised to believe that the soul is more important than the flesh. And that eternity concerns the soul – flesh (mortality) is fleeting.
I was also raised to believe that a baby who dies goes to heaven because they are not old enough to make a decision.
If a baby matures and does not get saved, it is going to spend eternity in hell.
Restating, an aborted baby goes to heaven – guaranteed. A baby that is “permitted” to grow up _could_ spend an eternity in hell. (When determining eternity a very low 1% probability is unacceptable.)
If that logic works, the aborted children have been given a guarantee to heaven. And a short cut – no bother of waiting decades to get there.
I am not a Bible believer (hard for me to accept that koalas walked from Noah’s landing spot to Australia, bypassing points between entirely), so I am going to hell for eternity. If I was aborted, I’d be going to heaven.
This logic _did_ hold in ancient Europe – this is a gruesome link – if you look at it start at “Religion, rules and rationality.”
http://economicstudents.com/2012/10/a-hell-of-an-incentive-for-murder-a-rationalists-guide-to-suicide/
A rationalization is a rationalization. I guess if you really want to kill someone there is a theory you can look to for assistance. There were surely kooks in ancient times as there are now.
And I think you are missing the point of human life in the Christian world view. It is not to interrupt your journey to eternity but to glorify the Creator. You were born, you were presented the Gospel, and God will be glorified in your ultimate end.