What is life, if not the seed?
Friday, November 1st, 2024,
A friend keeps sharing this image on Facebook.
I find it annoying, and here's why…
Every time I eat one of my chicken's eggs, I am aware of the chick never to be.
A seed is why the seedling, the plant, the bud, and the flower exist -- all for the singular purpose of creating more seeds.
Once a sperm enters an egg, and there is a flash of light in the darkness of the womb, a human life has begun.
A woman's body belongs to no one but herself, and (God-willing) she will enjoy a long life, beginning with her own conception and ending with her death. In which case, —if her body is no one else's — then it was no one else's from the beginning.
As is true of the new life within her.
None of this means the issue is simple. It's brutally complicated and fraught with risk and challenge, as is all of life, but…
The point I hope to make is that the "simplicity" of the message offered by the above image is misleading, inaccurate, dismissive, and we are not helped by it.
All too often we hear the phrase “My body my choice.” I agree one hundred percent… when it is about the 46 chromosomes person and her/his own body. Isn’t it how we differentiate between ourselves? Aside from identical same sex siblings (and I grew up with a pair of them as friends), we are distinct individuals (they were too). So when a mother who is with child claims that phrase to be the reason why she has the right to end the life of the dependent and innocent child growing within her, it saddens me to know she’s been deceived by the death cultists lie that her child, the precious life she’s conceived is merely a “product of that conception”. I am one of those… and if you have a pulse, a heartbeat pushing blood through your circulatory system and lungs exchanging gases within them, so are you. I was asked by a very liberal professor who is gone now, what I would do in the instance where the life of the mother is at stake (a premise that already differentiates the separate life involved, btw). My answer was “You save the mother of course! But you also do everything possible to save the child as well, miscarriages and stillbirths unfortunately happen in the natural course of life and death. But why not save them both? Why not love them both?” He kind of gave that little frown, not of disappointment but of a sense of approval and said, “I can live with that.” I thought to myself, so can a new baby…
The issue can be very difficult when it comes to how the mother came to be with child, rape or incest, the first should always involve justice for the rapist but not death for the child, nor should a woman be forced to carry a baby of the man or men who carried out such a heinous act on another person against their will. But as my parents used to say, two wrongs don’t make a right. There are plenty of couples who cannot have children of their own who would be wonderful parents to someone’s unwanted baby. I personally believe rape could be reduced if we knew it was a genuine rape and not a false claim and proof of who the father is genetically. Either full child support for 21 years or snip dingle - snip dingle.