What to do in these perilous times? How do I explain to a pressing four-year-old that our president would let me kill a baby in my tummy? He says its OK. Jane keeps asking, "Do you think Obama will come to our house?" Eyes wide, she wants to know will Daddy protect Lucy from Obama? It's all so literal for her. Lucy is still a BABY! HELP!! And after all isn't she?
My first pregnancy I miscarried. Sorrow upon alum sorrow. The second was Jane. Six weeks old and grain-of-rice-size, even so, I watched her tiny heart pulse. ALIVE. The inexplicable spark of life had happened right there inside of me before I even knew. Every nuance of Jane written out in complex codes of DNA snapped into place and pulse-pulse-pulse. The unique imprint of soul already authored by God was right there, beating. How terrifying, God gave me a life?!
Can it really be that we devote an entire industry to snuffing this life out? No matter how efficient, noninvasive, and quickly done, I will always see a tiny freckle in my womb beating away, fierce with life. Jane will see Lucy.
God who gave us life gave us liberty. And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are a gift from God? That they are not to be violated but with His wrath? Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, and that His justice cannot sleep forever.
~Thomas Jefferson
(excerpts are inscribed on the walls of the Jefferson Memorial in the nation's capital) [Source: Merrill . D. Peterson, ed., Jefferson Writings, (New York: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., 1984), Vol. IV, p. 289. From Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia, Query XVIII, 1781.]
