I Almost Loved

We all think life is precious, especially our own lives. How many times have you heard someone relate an experience, and at the end exclaimed, "I almost died!" How unthinkable one's own death can be.  

Roe v. Wade is about life (and death), and when it matters most (and least). It is about women (and men) who declare their rights to live unencumbered by the children they conceive. It is about children waiting, (and in their pre-nascent minds hoping to be born, at all.)

The decision to abort a pregnancy is a life and death moment for a woman. Sometimes, it is a collective effort: friends, parents, and even family ministers will collude with the mother to save her from an unborn child who would destroy her life. All the while, that child is waiting for her chance - not to destroy, but to open her eyes and look around in wonder, like babies do. She is waiting. She is alive in there. 

Meanwhile, they are telling the mother, "You can have another baby... later." Yes, she can, but she cannot have that baby living inside of her "later". That baby gets only one chance at life. Nobody can have that baby ever again.  

The mother ponders, and the living fetus grows. It can only grow into one thing - a human child. It is the only way a human child can come into this world. 

Her parts grow steadily. She flexes her muscles. She is getting ready for life. (One day soon, she could be smiling, and jubilantly flailing her little fists at the world.) She is on her way to the only life set aside for her. But, her mother is having none of it. She is thinking about her own fragile life, and how this little wanna-be inside of her will spoil things if she makes it out alive. 

I hear tell of the "rights of the unborn," but I fear those rights exist at the behest of those whose own existence matter much more. That should leave us all to worry for the aborted child who will never know how precious is life. The most she will ever get out of it is a whiff.