Thanks Mom?

My mother was a very good woman, of that I am as certain as anything I have ever known in this life.

She loved God, loved her family, and despite being overwhelmed by a debilitating illness that robbed her of much of her life's full enjoyment, she never ceased to express that love to either.

My mom mattered. She mattered in my life, the life of my brother, the lives of my children, and the lives of a great number of other friends and family members. She touched us all in a way that will always be with us.

But for as much as she was to everyone else, what she was to my brother Mike and I was extra special. But did she choose life for us? Roe did not exist then, should it have, should we have been her 'choice'?

This is an important idea to discuss, as yesterday was the awful anniversary of the 'Roe v Wade' court decision that made abortion a legal medical procedure here in the United States. What 'Roe' effectively did was lead to the mass slaughter of more than 50 million American babies over the next three and a half decades.

Supporters of that decision would argue that had 'Roe' been in effect in 1961, my birth would not have been the miracle from God that it was considered at that time, but instead it would have been a medical 'choice' made by my mom. And it would have been a 'choice' that she could make regardless of what my dad wanted.

Of course her 'choosing' to nurture and birth me out into the world should probably be something that would make me happy, right? What is better, to be considered just some random accident of nature, or something forced on her by God, or a conscious choice made by one's mother or parents together?

Hands That Shed Innocent Blood

For the past couple of weeks this 'Sunday Sermon' series (each entry can be read by clicking on the label at the bottom of this post) has been focusing on Proverbs 6:16-19 which covers the six things that the Lord hates, and a 7th which is an abomination.

The 3rd item in this list would be "hands that shed innocent blood" which is sadly ironic considering Friday night's murder of Philadelphia police officer John Pawlowski.

Whether or not John's killer will end up spending an eternity in hell, whether anyone who takes an innocent human life will suffer that fate, is not for us to say or know. But one thing that Proverbs makes undeniably clear is that this murder of innocents is particularly detestable to God Himself.

On Friday night, John Pawlowski was an innocent man. Perhaps more than that, he was working actively to try and help keep peace and order in his community. He was a police officer in an increasingly violent major American city that is itself ironically nicknamed 'The City of Brotherly Love'. It is a moniker that is no longer appropriate.

John and his partner exited their police vehicle after being flagged down to handle a disturbance on the highway. While handling this dispute, one of the individuals involved reached into his own pocket and shot right through his jacket, killing John Pawlowski there and then. Innocent blood once again shed in one of the acts that God hates.

Each year, hundreds and hundreds of Philadelphians are murdered in cold blood by their fellow citizens.

Marching For Life

January 22nd, 1973 was one of the worst dates in the history of the United States of America. On that date 36 years ago today, the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) delivered its opinion in the case of 'Roe vs. Wade'.

According to the SCOTUS decision, most laws restricting abortion in America violated a constitutional right to privacy under the Due Process clause of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

The ruling basically overturned all state and federal laws restricting abortions. It centrally held that a mother could abort her pregnancy for any reason up until the point at which the baby, referred to in the ruling by its scientific developmental stage name 'fetus', became 'viable'. It defined viability as the baby having the potential to live outside the mother's womb, albeit with artificial aid, and placed this term at between 24-28 weeks.

The court also held that abortion after viability must also be available in order to protect a woman's health, and this 'health' was defined broadly in a companion case called 'Doe vs. Bolton'.

The court based its ruling on its desire to protect personal freedoms and privacy. A woman should be able to make medical decisions involving her health along with her doctor, and the government should in no way be interfering in this process.

Of course never anywhere in their ruling did the court recognize the very apparent fact that there is not just one life, not just one person's health, being affected by a decision to abort. There is a baby alive inside of the mother.

Fox's 'Choice'

This past Saturday night, the Fox News Channel aired a compelling one-hour program titled "Facing Reality: Choice". 

In the program, Fox followed a trio of women as they went through their own particular "choice" process after learning that they were pregnant.

The women, their circumstances, their attitudes, and finally their choices could not have been more heterogeneous.

Kayla is a beautiful woman in her low-20's, born and raised in a practicing Christian environment by her strongly pro-life mother. As a teenager, she took the "chastity pledge" and wore a "purity ring" to acknowledge her commitment to remain a virgin until marriage.

She herself was strongly anti-drug, and like her mom, thought of herself as strongly pro-life. Then she went to college, turned into a partier, experimented with drugs, met a guy, got pregnant.

Her unmarried roommate was also pregnant, and they had frequent girl-chats about how fun it was going to be having their kids at the same time, and raising them as friends.

Big problems popped up though (imagine that) when Kayla's "partner" (read: baby's daddy) didn't want to raise a child. Suddenly Kayla was preparing to become a single mother.

With her future on the line, she was after all trying to graduate from beauty school, Kayla made the "difficult" choice to have an abortion, against everything that she had previously believed in as a theory. She even was able to enlist her mom's support in the project, and mom attended the actual abortion procedure with her.