I am nine weeks pregnant. I recently had the privilege of watching that nine week person through ultrasound; I watched a tiny heart beat in quick time, in the grainy image I saw new life tucked cozily and safely within me. It’s miraculous, there hidden and quiet, life is within my body, developing rapidly. I am a woman, and because of this wonderful fact, I get to carry and bear life, what a marvelous design. I hope I never lose the awe of that, even long after my child bearing years have passed.

But even as I celebrate this tiny person within me; as I look forward to holding them, and watch my oldest son of six delight in the knowledge that he has another sibling, as my husband and I try to guess whether it will be another boy or another girl, I am simultaneously grieving. We have passed the 46th year of Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton, while simultaneously New York passed a law allowing abortions up until delivery, stating  reasons such as “the health of the mother”, and “fetal viability”, thinly veiled terms that ignore the fact that medical literature argues that abortions after 24 weeks are considered more dangerous to the mother than delivery of living child via c-section or induction and vaginal delivery.

We live in a world that tells me this design that allows me to be part of the creative process of bringing new life in the world is not marvelous, but rather a burden. My fertility is seen as a disease, and my womb can alternatively become a proverbial gas chamber if I so choose. In a strange twist of irony the very people who claim they are “for women” have deemed the most womanly function of childbearing as burdensome.

New life has become our enemy and our womb is the war zone.

We are sacrificing our children for androgyny and sex: men can have sex without consequence or fear of pregnancy so women too should have that right. Or so the propaganda goes. Women, are we so easily fooled?

We are sacrificing our children for money, prestige, reputation, and fear, and we call it progress. We call it “good”.

We are a barbaric civilization, and no different than any of those who have gone before us.

Archeologists have discovered sewers clogged with the tiny bones of newborn babies dumped down the drain. A news article [by M.R. Reese in Ancient Origins 2014] explains “During Roman times, it was not uncommon for infants to be killed as a form of birth control. It was not a crime, as newborn infants were viewed as being ‘not fully human’.
-Love Thy Body By Nancy Pearcey

The history of humanity is littered with abortion and infanticide,  early civilizations considered it normal to simply allow unwanted children to be left to die, or to abort them before birth, the only exceptions were early Judaism and Christianity which explicitly forbade both. The people of God stood against the tyranny of sacrificing the weakest because God stands against such wickedness.

Abortion is no more forward thinking than Gladiator games, no more compassionate than slavery, no more honoring to women than prostitution. It has always been a part of every barbaric, power-loving, and cruel nation. America has for 46 years been in the ranks of such nations. We may be better at hiding the tiny bones, more sterile in our procedure, and more talented in lying to ourselves, but still the wind is filled with the silence of millions of heartbeats stopped. There is an eerie feeling of millions of missing children, murdered in silence.

It does not have to be so. We don’t have to swallow the propaganda. We don’t have to sacrifice our children. We can embrace every single life as valuable, and cease stratifying people. We can honor life as the gift that it is, and celebrate it at every stage, just as the God who creates it commands that we do. We can honor women and their bodies, and celebrate that we are life-givers; spurning every suggestion that we be life-takers. We can defend the defenseless, we can speak for those who have no voices, and we can let every heart keep beating in the safety of their mother’s womb.

Our wombs ought not be war zones, they ought to be the safest place in the world. Life is not our enemy, it is in fact our reminder that the enemy, Death, has been defeated by the Life-giver himself.