Take your index and middle fingers and bring them up to your neck. Press them right under your jaw. Can you feel it? Do you sense it? Stop reading this for a second, close your eyes, and just take in the rhythm. Feel the life steadily marching forward. Each one of those beats is a gift from God. Paul quotes, "In Him we live and move and have our being." When the heart stops, a person dies. Maybe not immediately, but when the heart stops every priority is to get it started again. The time it takes for this to occur and the person to survive is measured in seconds. It is through the continued beating of our heart that we live. It is through God that our heart beats. Every beat of our heart is a gift of God. If you're like me, you've got about seventy gifts from God every minute. That makes four thousand two hundred gifts every hour, over one hundred thousand every day, and about 37 million over the course of a year. But that's only if I'm resting. As much as I'd like to lay around and do nothing all day long, it doesn't quite work that way. So for argument's sake let's just say that I have about 45 heartbeats a year. I'm sure my nurse friends will give me a hundred reasons why that number is off, but there is another reason I chose it as well. Are you still feeling your heartbeat? Are you still counting God's gifts? Listen to them. Hear them as you feel them with your fingers. Every time your heart beats, it also represents someone else's heart that has been forcefully stopped. According to the Guttmacher Institute, 45 million children were murdered in their mother's womb between 1970 and 2005. Every time your heart beats this year, it does so as a memorial of one of those children. With your fingers on your pulse, do you feel their deaths? I know, I know, you're thinking, "BJ, now you're getting all political on me." Is murder political? "But" you say, "It isn't really a life. It's just a fetus." By saying the negro was something less than human, the southern gentry was able to keep the institution of slavery and all its attendant evils going for hundreds of years. But what is life? There is a continuity of life that begins from conception and moves through gradual changes until the moment a person dies. The emergence from the womb is just one of those changes and by no means the most significant. To say life begins there rather than when brainwaves begin, or when the heart beats is an arbitrary convenience at best. But lets call the lie what it is. Some might concede that you cannot deny that life begins far before birth, but they argue that is not true from a legal standpoint. Then why can a man who kills a pregnant woman be charged with double homicide? I remember being at the memorial at the World Trade Center after the first bombing (before 9-11). Included among the names of the victims was the preborn child who had died. The whole world recognized that this was a human life that was taken. But look at the situation that this child will be brought up in. Wouldn't it be better for the child's sake and ours that the preborn child never be brought into this world. Hitler also said things like that. The Jews are a nuisance to society. They are a drag on the economy. It is better to keep them out of our world. The fact is, most of the forty five million preborn children who have been killed were simply considered an inconvenience. Most of the heartbeats that were stopped were murders of convenience. So every time I feel my heartbeat I remember that there is a child's heart that was ripped apart. Every time my heart thumps, I remember that there is a mother who did not have a heart. And with every beating gift from God I will do my best to make sure that someone else will not destroy the precious gift from God growing inside them. It is not my choice. It is my obligation.
I had a lady ask me to sign a petition. She wanted to put a pro-choice candidate on the ballot. I told her that while I appreciated her efforts, I could never deliberately endorse a pro-choice candidate if there was a pro-life candidate available. She looked as if she was about to gently "reason" with me. You know the routine. So I told her, "I know it's supposed to be irrational and unintelligent to vote based on just one issue like abortion, but if the law were making it legal to kill your brother, you'd go ahead and vote based on that issue, I'm sure. "
To me, this is a life in need of saving. I have no other choice. When I explained that, she kind of nodded in understanding, realizing that I had thought it through. I don't know if it made a difference, but I wasn't trying to convince her, actually. I was only trying to give a clear and polite reason for why I was so rudely refusing to sign her clipboard. I hope she got the heart of my message and would appreciate it.
I hear people say, "all those birth control pills are so harmful to my body!" At the same time, their first thought at learning they are pregnant would be, "oops, that wasn't supposed to happen! It's not the right time. I can't afford to have a baby right now!"
What it boils down to is that they would rather kill an undeveloped soul within them, rather than harm their own body, let alone not be lazy and REMEMBER to take the pill, instead of taking the risk of getting pregnant. Now that is sad to me.
Doesn't it seem logical to say that, if you harm your body - you sin against yourself; if you kill the baby within you - you sin doubly, once against the life inside and once against yourself?
