Created For Love and Life

The recent March for Life in Washington, D.C. has been compared to the civil rights marches which, when they first began, met with resistance at worst and indifference at best in many parts of the country. Looking back, it is hard especially for someone as young as my daughter to remember how divided we were as a nation over those issues and how long we put up with the degradation of our brother and sister Americans. Why didn't we care more, think more, protest more, than we did? What was blinding us to the ugly realities which were as near as the signs in the local barbershop or the public bathrooms, as near as the people sitting far enough from us to ensure they would not be confused with us, a better class of humanity?

I heard one woman, speaking on a televised program about abortion, ask whether we, or our descendants will look back years from now and be appalled at what we allow to go on all around us. Will we or they wonder how we could have been so indifferent to the claims put forward by educated people that babies in the womb are not really babies, despite the sure knowledge that their hearts beat and they feel pain? Will we ask how we could have stood by as our elected leaders pushed us to allow abortions because "someone might not have the resources to care for their unwanted child, and wouldn't it be kinder to let the child die now."

I lost three babies, each in early pregnancy, and all I ever knew about them was that their hearts were beating for a few precious weeks. The medical community around me did everything they could to support my pregnancies, and to support further investigation into why I couldn't carry those babies to term. They had astounding resources available for testing, for diagnosing, for intervening if a baby were born prematurely and for giving that baby every chance to live. Yet these same caring people treated my babies after they died as tissue, "blighted tissue" they said. Why is a baby, even in the eyes of skilled doctors, so often more precious if she can be seen, and treated,lying in an incubator or being held in her mother's arms? Why is she disposable if she is too small to survive outside her mother's womb, unseen by human eyes yet wrapped in a blanket of her mother's own tissue and sustained by her mother's beating heart? The greatest medical mystery which no doctor, no politician, no human person at all will ever be able to comprehend in more than the most superficial terms is the mystery of how human life can go on, how the continuation of life itself requires nothing more than creating the time in parent's lives and the space in their hearts to allow it to happen. And for the mother, giving over to the first few cells blossoming by the minute into more than the sum of the parts, the place in her womb which is the child's first home. My own mother did that seven times, one of those times carrying twins, so that eight of us were sheltered and loved into this world, before we were known or seen by human eyes or , I might add, prepared for financially other than in very modest ways.

I did not attend the March for Life in Washington, nor a similar march held here in Dallas. But I plan to in coming years. It is a beautiful way to be heard, a group of human beings offering nothing more than their feet to walk, their hands to fold and their hearts and voices united in prayer for the simple truth that all human life is sacred. The walk itself is prayer, every step taken a thanksgiving for the gift of movement and the freedom to act. That's all we have to do to show our gratitude for life: walk, breathe, sing, clap, pray: And direct it to God.

I AM, you ARE, we ARE, that baby in the womb IS.

Sing for joy! Shout in exultation! The Lord has done marvellous things!


Will our descendants look back and wonder that we did not grasp that truth? Or that we claimed it only for ourselves and not for others? I AM, you ARE NOT. This baby is loved into being, that baby is not. I want to help YOU, but not you.

Perhaps this is harder to achieve than civil rights, which were hard enough. It's one thing to be comfortable with allowing others to share a bus, a school, competition for jobs, even the presidency. But welcoming life itself, even under the most difficult circumstances, welcoming and celebrating life when no father is present, when high school is not yet completed, when getting a job is only a dream - isn't that the hardest path of all?

It asks for something other than educated minds, or skilled hands, something more than careful planning and convenient scheduling. A new life calls for trust, trust in the helping hands around us, trust that compassion and self sacrificace are available, trust that the One who created life and offers it to us will not abandon a single morsel of that creation, trust in the future and trust in the here and now.

Not every fifteen year old who finds herself with child will have all the trust that is needed, but she can and should have adults around her who do have that faith and who will pledge to help her until she can see for herself.

Not every grown woman with a solid job whose career is trending upward will have that trust, but she too should have the same support, the same opportunity to discover for herself that life is not a matter of convienence but of love.

Created for love, created to be
a child of God, our destiny.
Created for life, it's joys and dark nights.
God dwells within us and waits for our hearts.
Made in God's image, with Jesus we dare
a calling to give;
in sacricfice we share.
Glorificamus in Dominum!