A Dream I Hold Dear

In my last post, I talked about not letting your dreams die. Now, old dreams might change and have to be reinvented into new ones; but, the passion that fuels those dreams–both old and new– should remain intact, and THAT is what we should not let go of. We simply redirect it into another conduit. Let me tell you about one of my dreams that has had to change, but which I refuse to give up on.

At a young age, I picked up the book Gianna: Aborted . . . and Lived to Tell About It at a Christian bookstore, bought it, and devoured it in about a day.

My heart was tortured with the knowledge that a woman would try to kill her precious little baby. I hated abortion with all my young heart. And I still do.

But what could I do about it?

I thought myself too young to be able to make any difference. So, while I continued hating it just as much as ever, I resigned myself to the idea that it was an evil too big for any one person to put a dent in. And that’s probably true. But, now that I’m older, I’ve come to see that, just as with slavery, it will take many people working tirelessly together, over a period of many years, and weathering many fierce storms, to see an end to such wickedness.

And, just as with slavery, it is not just the action itself that needs to be condemned, but the very ideology that initially led to its being accepted in the first place. Do you see what I mean? For slavery to be accepted, people first had to see the black person as less than human. Outlawing slavery got rid of some of the problems, but many problems continued to persist into the 20th Century. Why? Because many folks still thought of black people in the same way. They saw them as inferior. The way we think about something influences how we treat that something–or someone.

Now, take the unborn. Abortion is accepted because people see the tiny child growing in his or hers mother’s womb as less than human, as inferior. To combat this evil, we must not only make it illegal to abort a baby, we must also show people that babies are human beings with just as much value as the rest of us. We need to believe that they are worthy of the same treatment and love we ourselves think we deserve.

My dream was never fully articulated; all I knew was that I wanted to do something about it–I wanted to protect the babies of the world, just like many people wanted to abolish slavery. How I would do that, I didn’t know. The dream lay fallow. I grew up; met a handsome man; had children; got married (yes, in that order, though I’m not proud of it); became a housewife. If I was ever going to make a difference, surely it would never be possible now. But, what if it could?

I transferred my love of the unborn, to my own. As I feel each baby growing in my safe, warm womb, I cherish him or her with the love and tenderness all aborted babies everywhere deserved from their own mothers. I know that maybe my circumstances are not as drastic or as desperate as theirs; but I do my best to accept my own situation in life as it is. I do what they should have done; and that, in my own small way, is how I fight abortion. That is my way of continuing the dream I began all those years ago. But, there’s more.

As mentioned above, I eventually realized that the reason our society has accepted abortion is because it views babies as inferior beings. And I discovered that this is a poison present not only in our society, but in the mind of the Christian, as well. What? Christians are the ones fighting to end abortion, right? Yes, and No. While they fight to end the action of abortion (kind of like fighting to end the institution of slavery) many of them fail to address the root concern: the way we think about the unborn.

Yes, they consider the child still in his or her mother’s womb a human being. But, they do not truly cherish babies. What I mean to say, is that they fight against killing babies once they’ve been conceived, while at the same time trying to keep them from being conceived in the first place through birth control, including “Natural” Family Planning. In their minds, a person is only valuable once he or she is conceived (and even then, some Christians treat the child’s rights as inferior to their own); but, a person is not valuable as a prospect. There are many Christians everywhere who dislike the prospect of having more children.

So, when you get down to it, numerous Christians do not really value children. They are hypocrites. I used to be one, too. How can you love someone you try to prevent? How can you faithfully protect the rights of someone  you worked night after night to reject? Are we liars–haters of mankind while we claim to love it?

Swirling and spiraling upward, my dream was transformed into a thundercloud of fury and passion. Fury, because I still hate abortion just as much as I did when I was a little girl. And passion, because I want every Christian, including myself, to love children just as much before they’re born as after; and just as much before they’re conceived as after. I want us to love the idea of children in our minds, so that we can truly love them once they “get here,” with our actions. That is in part why I write on this blog; I cling to the hope that others will catch the fire of this dream and help it to spread.

If you agree with this message, if this is your dream as well, please be bold enough to spread the message (and live it out in your own life). Abortion is wrong, and birth control is wrong. Get rid of one and you will affect the other as a natural course, since abortion is the logical conclusion of contraception; it is what they do when birth control fails. And birth control causes us to devalue human life in the womb because it influences us to regard it as something “controlable” and within our “right” to manage, totally disregarding both God’s right over human life and the baby’s (meaning, person’s) right to exist. And though I don’t approve of having children outside of marriage, let’s be consistent–birth control is not good for anyone, married, or not. In fact, if birth control were not available, we would have less promiscuity and all other sorts of wicked behavior.