This Horrible Anniversary...

Does anyone else out there find themselves at a loss for words on this day, in the face of the destruction of over 55 million innocent lives over the course of 40 years of legalized murder?  It's horrifying and mind boggling and I find myself strangely silent and struggling to break that silence, because silence in the face of such evil is hardly tolerable.  I find myself staring at Patrick every chance that I get and appreciating his healthy baby chubbiness and sweet smiles.

Three months ago he was already a chubby eight pound bouncing baby boy and we were in the hospital where over a dozen doctors were baffled by what was going on, yet ran test after test and hooked us up to IV after IV to ensure that we were okay.  Yet there are other "doctors" out there, who would have willingly ended his life at that point and called it a "choice." Was the value of his life really based on the fact that I wanted him and loved him and not on the fact that he simple existed, already alive and steadily growing to face the world where he legally could have been killed for the first nine months of his existence?

I do not understand how a child can be a child if I say it is, but not be a child if I say it's not.  Reality doesn't work that way.  

January, in my mind, is the most difficult of months.  If I could I would blot it from the calendar, along with February, and sail from December to March, easily and thoughtlessly.  I spend January, more than any other month for these past two years, slogging along and trying not to think of the rapidly approaching date, February 7th, when Christian would be one, and if he was anything like his sisters, would be toddling around the house on unsteady little legs wreaking havoc on any ideas of order or neatness that I'd carefully arranged.  Throw in this most terrible of anniversaries and I have little use for the month.  

We are so, so blessed that God has given us Patrick (born nine months and one day after that lost due date), and we are so, so blessed to have a little saint praying for us in heaven, and yet the greedy part of my mother's heart longs to hold them both, to cuddle them both, to see them playing together in the back yard.  And I mourn for mothers who carry that same burden, along with the terrible knowledge that they, in some way, played some part in that end.  I cannot imagine the heaviness of such a sorrow.  

You see, I remember that day in the hospital when I saw Christian's heartbeat, so little and slow at twelve weeks, still alive and fighting for life and it breaks my heart to think that any doctor who had pledged to do no harm could take such a little life and snuff it out without a second thought.  He was alive and human that day, not because I willed it, but because he was.  Our worth is not based on who loves us, but on the fact that we are.  

We should be protected by the law not because of who we are, not because we've done something special or achieved something that gives us value, but simply because we exist and our existence has value and worth.  When you take away that worth society's moral compass becomes skewed.  The important is pushed aside as worthless (or worth something only is someone else gives it value) and amusements are elevated as we attempt to fill the hole we've torn in ourselves, denying that part of ourselves that knows right from wrong and that knows the destruction of innocent human life is, at the most basic level, very, very wrong.

I've heard people say, more and more frequently, that the tide has turned.  That the era that gave us abortion is grinding along on worn out wheels as more and more people see, with the latest and greatest technology that at the start of life we are much more than a lump of cells, much earlier than the abortion clinics, looking to make a quick buck, would have us believe.  And I hope... I pray... that it's true and this time of horror in which life is so cheap and so easily disposed of really is coming to an end.