Tuesday, January 27, 2009

"To waste the flower of our love and to kill the fruit of our loins is wrong."

A recent letter to the editor of the Wall Street Journal:

Dear Mr. Pollock:

One of the last orders that George W. Bush signed as President was the January 2009 National Sanctity of Human Life Day Proclamation. His pro-life record includes the Born-Alive Infants Protection Act, the ban on partial-birth abortion, the Unborn Victims of Violence Act, and the block of Federal funding for overseas "family planning" abortion programs.

One of the first orders that Barak H. Obama has signed as President is a reversal of the ban on taxpayer-funded international abortions. He also plans to expand the power to kill innocent lives via the Freedom of Choice Act (FOCA). We cannot print enough worthless monopoly money to solve our national and global economic crisis, but we still have plenty of hard cash in the budget for killing babies at home and abroad?

On the 36th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, Dr. Alveda King, niece of Martin Luther King, challenged Mr. Obama to include unborn children in his vision of life, liberty, and justice for all. Maybe he will be strong enough to abolish chattel abortion, just as President Lincoln abolished chattel slavery. If not, someday a great President will end the lucrative business of elective abortion. Someday the record will show who really cared about human rights. The rhetoric will end, and the record will stand.

Someday great reporters will have the stomach to expose the practices and profits of the elective abortion industry and the sale of baby body parts. The taboo on reporting prenatal violence will be lifted by men and women of conscience, who know that the blood of the littlest human beings should not be used to pay for the unprincipled behavior of adults who refuse to take responsibility for the consequences of sexual activity.

Someday the violence of abortion methods will be as abhorrent as any other assault or physical abuse. The paradox of those who oppose the death penalty but promote abortion will end. Pacifists will oppose elective abortion when they realize that more babies have died from abortion in the last 36 years than all of the soldiers and civilians who died from all of the modern military wars combined.

Someday elective abortion, the ultimate example of age discrimination, will be unthinkable. Those who said that women were not legal persons could not prevail. Those who said that slaves were not legal persons had to fail. Someday the tiny human beings who are not yet born will have protection as legal persons. Medical and technological advances will continue to roll back the frontiers of inner space in defining the genesis of human life. Hands that grasp and hearts that beat will be more eloquent than the most self-indulgent right-to-choose, right-to-kill, right-to-privacy speech.

"Little Lamb, who made thee?" asked the poet William Blake in "The Lamb," his most delicate song of innocence. He mourned the fate of chimney sweeps caught in narrow Victorian infernos. Someday a poet may write a parallel piece:

Little Life, who saved thee?

Dost thou know who saved thee?

Little Life, I'll tell thee.

They are called by thy name,

For they call themselves humane.

Someday great poets will grieve for the grisly piles of fetal bodies incinerated daily in the land of the free. Someday great writers will grieve for broken lives of unwed undone mothers-not-to-be in the land of the brave.

Who will be the abolitionists? Who will participate in the Underground Railroad? Who will be the new Harriet Tubman? Who will be the new Mother Teresa? Will there be a Horton who discovers the "Who" of unborn personhood in universes of discourse more lovely than we can imagine? Let it be so. Let it be now. Let it be me. When future generations look back on our 3.5 decades of slaughtering innocents, when they recoil at the hypocrisy of our polite exterminations, when they rebuke publicly-funded genocide, when they condemn the press for its cowardly cover-up, when they wonder why nobody said anything, let them find my poor name in a pile of old newspapers, as one who said "To waste the flower of our love and to kill the fruit of our loins is wrong."

Cynthia L. Hallen
Pleasant Grove, Utah

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