"When Are You a Person?"

Psalm 127:3- Behold, children are a gift of the Lord; the fruit of the womb is a reward.

I am the eldest of six children. Italians are very big on family, especially babies. I don’t remember any time until my 12th or 13th birthday when there wasn’t a high-chair in our home. It seemed as if my Mom was always taking care of babies, or waiting for a new baby to be born. Each new member of the family was met with great celebration as family gathered at our house waiting for Mom to come home from the hospital with our new sister or brother. Funny faces and baby talk was rampant from everyone from my Grandmother to all of us kids. As I write this, I remember the new baby smell of powder that permeated the house. Aunts, uncles and cousins all showed up to celebrate our new addition. Nona prepared food, and there was pastry with strong coffee and Chianti for everybody. We all regarded this as a blessing from God!

Currently, abortion is legal in America, and our President is a supporter of this practice. Nancy Pelosi, who is supposedly a practicing Roman Catholic, is also a supporter of this procedure. I have strong feelings about abortion, both as a Christian, and as an American. I don’t know what price we are paying for each loss of an aborted child. I don’t know how many great doctors, lawyers or professors are left in a dumpster because of this evil practice. How much promise is cast into a trash can because of the “inconvenience” of a child? Our proposed “Obamacare” covers what is called “therapeutic abortion”: this term is liberally interpreted, and most “abortion doctors” will find a reason for the deadly procedure. It’s too bad about those “inconvenient” children.

Yesterday, I read one of the most disturbing articles I have read in quite a long time. If you are a proponent of abortion, you may want to rethink your feelings after hearing this. In Australia, two ethicists are working on the possibility of “post birth abortions”. This is a polite way of saying murdering a living, breathing baby after a successful delivery! This proposal cites reasoning like “putting the well being of the family first, even if it (the baby) had the potential for an acceptable life”. These advocators of murder also said a fetus or a newborn cannot be considered a PERSON in the morally relevant sense. Listen to this statement and try not “throwing up”: “Merely being human is not in itself a reason for ascribing someone with a right to life.” This sounds quite a bit like the NAZI philosophy of racial cleansing to me. The fact that this is being discussed at all should disturb us.

We continue to devalue human life when it seems to interfere with the “convenient” flow of our lives. To deny personhood to a living child (from the moment of conception) is the advocating of murder! I fear that if this becomes an acceptable theory, we will soon see further, more reaching theories of “acceptable” murder, perhaps the denial of treatment for certain ailments for those who have “outlived their usefulness”.

We stand at the brink of treating human life as a disposable commodity. In a civilized world we must take a stand against, even the thought, of this type of philosophy, or we will soon be facing “death panels”!