HIS FIRST AND LAST GIFT

By Dr. Jean Garton

On a June summer night a few years ago a section of Interstate 95 collapsed over the river in Greenwich Connecticut. A young couple was o~ the bridge, behind a trailer truck which suddenly fish-tailed. The young man jammed on the brakes and braced for the inevitable crash. Instead, the truck disappeared into a black hole as the car screeched to a halt ten feet short of the gaping chasm. In his rear view mirror, the driver saw the lights of an approaching car. He ran back along the highway, yelling and frantically waving his arms, trying to warn the oncoming vehicle. But the car, with two young males, never slowed. Instead, the driver made an obscene hand gesture at the lonely figure desperately trying to warn him. It was his last act before he and his passenger plunged over the edge to their death.
Two people - strangers - had messages for one another. One tried to warn the other of impending tragedy. The other responded with disdain, contempt and suicidal cynicism. Sound familiar? It will to those who have attempted to warn this society of the disaster that awaits an individual or a culture that tries to solve social , economic or personal problems by eliminating "problem" people.
That tragic event led me to wonder, "What might have stopped those young people?" We will never know, but we can be sure they were not the only victims of that tragedy.
Their Fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters, girl friends and classmates schools, communities, churches - all were affected in some way.
So, too, in the matter of abortion. What is promoted as a private matter has far-reaching public implications, and makes victims of many others like physicians, mothers, fathers, and living children.
Abortion has been promoted among PHYSICIANS as a "treatment." As a result, we have seen an acceptance of killing in the name of healing. Yet what happens to a medical profession engaged in killing unborn children - in staggering numbers - not passionately (as in child abuse); not fanatically (as in the Jim Jones massacre in Guyana); not neglectfully (as through starvation in Somalia); but coldly, detached and very, very lucratively? What happens to Western Medicine, the most compassionate, humane medicine in the world, when it reverts to pagan practice in which a doctor becomes both healer and exterminator at the same time?
In abortion, Nature becomes WOMAN'S opponent. A woman can have an ex-lover or an ex-husband but never an ex-child - only a living or a dead child-but a child, nevertheless, written forever on her biological consciousness. Because abortion - an unnatural act- contradicts a woman's maternal inclinations and instincts to protect her own flesh, it has created a sorority of permanently scarred women. Secular (and often religious) counseling discounts the feeling of guilt which many women experience. The issue, of course, isn't "feeling guilt." It is guilt.
These millions of abortion wounded women are in homes and classrooms today where they are raising tomorrow's children. What will these women pass on to the next generation in regard to self-control, duty, accountability, sacrifice?
Women are the repositories of values. The moral fiber of the women of a country determines the moral fiber of that country. How able are weakened, wounded women to do battle against the barbarism of moral relativism that is knocking on society's door?
MEN in theory have the God given right to beget children. But no man (married or otherwise) has any legal way to secure that right today. Abortion has effectively turned a whole segment of the male population into moral mush, reducing them to the status of the legendary monkeys who are to "see no evil, hear no evil and speak no evil," about a "woman's right to choose."
Some men are victims of abortion-abuse and suffer grief, anger and a general sense of impotence about their lives. I received this letter from such a man:
I am at Trenton State Prison for murder. But I have more guilt feelings about an abortion paid for many years ago than for the crime I am now in prison for. I know God has forgiven me for that killing, but I have never been able to pray away the guilt feelings I have about my part in the death of an unborn child."
Abortion goes beyond the rhetoric of "a woman's right to choose." Abortion, fundamentally and terrifyingly, is about the decline of human significance. Women have long sensed that in pregnancy the child they carried was theirs to protect. Abortion, instead, leads women and society to a sense that THE CHILD is theirs to possess. The result is a view of unborn children as property. Not surprising, then, that abortion has become a significant factor in the escalating epidemic of child abuse.
In the U.S. in 1993 there were four deaths a day from child abuse. Startling, shocking, certainly, but not surprising, given the implications of abortion for the well-being of all children whether born or unborn.
Abortion can produce a deep, subtle (and often permanent) fracture of the trusting relationship that once existed between a child and parent. When children are aware that their mother has had an abortion, some of them struggle with two unspoken questions. The first goes, "If I had been unwanted (handicapped, inconvenient, economically burdensome or whatever reason given by the mother to justify the abortion), would mother have done that to me?" The second question, logically, is, "If I become unwanted (handicapped, inconvenient, economically burdensome, or whatever), will mother do that to me?"
For some parents, even, abortion has become the ultimate weapon of discipline. While abortion cannot physically destroy the life of an already-born child, it can destroy his or her quality of life and even his or her will to continue that life. After I finished a slide presentation on life in the womb, the first hand to be raised with a question was that of a girl about twelve. "My mother," she announced, "had two abortions. Why was I allowed to live?"
After the program the girl's step-mother expressed her gratitude for my answer. She told me that the girl had already attempted to commit suicide twice, wanting to be with her aborted brother and sister. She explained that in the girl's early years she had lived with her biological mother, and whenever she did something that annoyed or upset the mother, the mother would say, "I wish to hell I'd aborted you, too."
Self-esteem and self-worth (especially of children in their formative years) can be shattered. With more than thirty five million abortions in the U.S. since Roe v. Wade in 1973, can we even imagine the impact that abortion has had on the psyche of a whole generation of children who escaped their own abortion only to find they are secondary victims of the abortion of their unborn brother or sister?
An ideological cause like "prochoice" tends to evaporate common sense. An overabundance of nonsense gets promulgated under the most socially impeccable auspices. I was, for example, involved in a debate with three pro-choice church professionals. They dominated the discussion with a defense of women's "rights" and "choices." At one point, I asked them to respond to the question," When does individual human life begin?"
The pastor said, "We can't talk about individual life - only about a life principle that began back in the Garden. Life is a continuum and cannot be discussed in terms of individuality." That, in the face of DNA! We now have the most reliable test in the world for establishing the ! individuality of each human life. The chance of someone else in the world having the same genetic makeup as you is one in one hundred millionth of one percent or, put another way, one in ten billion chances. It is obvious that each human life is wonderfully unique, irreplaceable and individual.
The next to answer was a clergyman serving in full-time Christian counseling. He said that individual human life begins when the mother accords personhood to the child; when she accepts "it" as part of the human family. Such a subjective view would be laughable if offered in any other than this ideological context. As a mother who has survived four teenagers, there were times I was quite convinced they were not members of the human family.
If personhood is mine to bestow, ought it not also be mine to withdraw? If "it" is mine to accept at some point, ought "it" not be mine to reject at another point? (The "terrible twos" or the tempestuous teens come
to mind.) Both the law and society rightly reject such a view after birth, while countenancing its intellectual wrong-headedness before birth.
The third professional was a hristian ethicist. "Doctor," I asked, "when does individual
human life begin?" He responded by declaring that individual human life begins in the minds of a man and woman when together they plan to bring a child into the world. Individual human life begins with their plan to create human life.
The pastor said, "profound ... very profound." The counselor said "deep ... very deep." I said, "Nonsense!
Doctor, I have four children, and by your standard the last two had no beginning."
If individual human life does not begin when the male sperm fertilizes the female egg, then the whole concept of biological fatherhood is an arrogant male myth. At no other point - except at that point - does a man contribute anything to the "beingness" of a child.
We are seeing the end of Christendom - not the end of Christianity, not the end of the Church - but the end of the influence of the Judeo-Christian ethic on the primary institutions of Western civilization.
Christians in every generation are called to forge a counterculture. Instead. many have manufactured a counterpart, living in the aura of Christianity but denying its substance.
For instance, a Bible Church provided the seed money for an abortion clinic. Since there have been abortions throughout human history, said the pastor, obviously, God has "ordained" abortion. A Lutheran gynecologist defends doing abortions by saying that children who die from abortion return to heaven and are reborn to another mother. An Episcopalian clergy woman says that abortion should be a sacrament. Indeed, she already knows people who are celebrating it as such.
Such a perverted witness is surely evidence that the human mind is never more clever or resourceful than when it is involved in self justification. The result, in the words of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, is that, "The 20th century has been sucked into the vortex of atheism and self destruction. The social theories that promised so much have demonstrated their bankruptcy, leaving us at a dead end."
Certainly there have been signs along the way that we are heading toward the degeneration of both American society and Western civilization. While abortion is but one sign, it is the most disturbing sign. Not only does it claim its monstrous numbers of victims, but it has evolved, in just 25 years, from being rejected to being tolerated, to being accepted, to being celebrated.
The cultural impact of abortion includes "fallout" for a future society. It sets into motion sequential processes that make their way into the ordinary "nuts and bolts" matters of every day living. Consider these examples.
Even the official views of those church bodies with pro-life policies have been seen as a matter of "choice" by some of their members. Abortion has been a major factor in the diminishing loyalty and faithfulness of members to their denominational teachings. Even more tragic are those members who are pro-life by conviction but pro-choice by apathy. It is terrible for Christians to have convictions without courage (Romans 14: 22-23).
Having sloganeered the "right" to have abortions into a multimillion dollar industry, the pro-choice people (and all of us) will soon experience an unavoidable economic reality-fewer growing children. While the missing generation can be calibrated in terms of missing income and missing productivity, there is an intangible that cannot be measured, only mourned. Who will mourn the cures never discovered, the wisdom never taught, the inventions never developed, the champions never honored because of a society that fails to see potential in what it dismisses as "blobs, tissue or products of conception."
It is hard to reveal the magnitude of death-making in our society. We are all involved somehow, however unwillingly or unwittingly, and we cannot, as a nation, escape the tragic reality of solidarity-in-guilt.
The millions of unseen, unheard, unwanted, unborn human beings who are no more, stand as witnesses against us. History has shown that God will not be mocked. God will have His children but in such a way that they are a judgment on us.
Additional groups are at risk of being "made dead." Societies have always set boundaries around themselves and, depending on the prevailing values of that society, have classified various groups of people as non-members.
History is replete with examples: the Supreme Court that excluded Dred Scott from personhood, the Egyptian pharaohs who excluded the Israelites, the Third Reich that excluded the Jews, the Canadians who excluded the Indians, the Australians who excluded the Aborigines. Disenfranchising some members of the human family from basic human rights and moral consideration, as is done in abortion, can lead to justifications for marginalizing, oppressing and even eliminating other classes of people.
How precious life must be to God! It is His first gift to us. Without that first gift, the other gifts of faith, hope and love would not exist. Yet life is not only God's first gift to us, it is also His last. If we are faithful, He says, He will give us a crown of life.
Abortion, at its core, is idolatry. Abortion grounds the identity, security and meaning of human life not in the God who is Creator, Redeemer and Sanctifier, but in self. Abortion constitutes the primary spiritual and moral crucible of this age. Abortion says to the culture that God can't provide and the Church can't help. The culture, in turn, says to the Church that while abortion may not be a good thing, it is usually the lesser of two evils.
But why should we offer women an evil of any kind?

* Dr. Garton is co-founder and National President of Lutherans For Life, with its 650 chapters nationwide, and author of the best-selling book, "Who Broke the Baby?" She was named in 1985 as one of "The Ten Most Influential Lutherans in America," by the Religious Heritage Foundation. Her article is adapted from Post-Abortion Aftermath, A Comprehensive Consideration, a collection of writings generated by various experts at a "Post-Abortion Summit Conference" and edited by Michael 1. Mannion in 1994, Sheed and Ward, Kansas City, MO