By Judie Brown
The children’s rhyme “Old MacDonald Had a Farm” enumerates the animals and their sounds. It is all about living, breathing farm animals, and I recall how much my children enjoyed listening to it and singing along when they were young.
But my joy at recalling that experience faded into sorrow as I learned about the latest alleged pro-life meandering that results in babies dying here, there, and everywhere.
As Dwain Currier underscores in American Life League’s “X” (Twitter) feed, pro-life leaders in many instances have defined the goal as saving as many babies as possible. And once that genie is out of the bottle, where does it end?
To be specific, if we say that we are supporting a piece of legislation that may protect only those babies with a detectable heartbeat, what happens to the rest of them? Apparently if a heartbeat cannot be detected, the baby can be thrown in the trash.
But it does not stop there.
Some say that where parental notification exists in abortion laws, babies are saved. While this is wonderful news for those preborn children whose grandparents deny their daughter permission to have her baby killed, many grandparents are all too happy to grant approval for the killing of their grandchildren.
We could go on, but the point of all this is quite simple: When is a preborn human being fair game for the killers who describe themselves as reproductive health specialists?
The pro-life response to that simple question should be never because every person is equally valuable and deserves legal, social, and cultural protection from the first moment of creation.
In 1981 when we first met North Carolina senator Jesse Helms, we were chomping at the bit to thank him for introducing the Paramount Human Life Amendment. We were extremely hopeful that the entire movement would support the proposal that would recognize human beings as persons without regard to age, health, or condition of dependency. Had that amendment passed and been ratified by 37 states, abortion would not be legal in America.
But that simple solution failed to materialize, and to this day we rue the abject failure of everyone identifying themselves as pro-life for not working tirelessly toward the goal of seeing the day when human personhood would become a constitutional right.
A humane society, of course, would never have had to propose such a goal, as we would not have approved the preborn child killing by abortion in the first place.
So now as we look back on those efforts and continue to insist that there is never a valid reason for abortion, a couple of personal thoughts come to mind.
I am nearly 83 years old, and our family has grown to the point where I have two great-grandsons with, please God, more to come in the future. Yes, our family is pro-life; as one of my grandsons said, it is “part of our genetic code.” But it is really much simpler than that.
We do not believe in cold-blooded murder. And that is exactly what abortion is. It is the willfully chosen response to an innocent baby whose life is deemed to be inconvenient, unacceptable, or simply unworthy of parental protection.
How low will we go, America?
Old MacDonald did not rush out to kill his farm animals, but we sophisticated Americans have no problem killing our own children. And the law allows it.
It is long past time for us to reflect on the words of Saint Francis de Sales, who taught, “Not only is God in the place where you are, but God is in a very special manner in the depths of your spirit.”
As He is in the spirit of every one of His creatures, we are compelled to call out to Him in our prayers, asking for the grace each human being needs to see Him, follow His will, and end the senseless slaughter of His babies.