Controversy or Catastrophe?

ABORTION: Controversy or Catastrophe?

To me, abortion on demand, as an “Oops-I-slipped” form of birth-control, defies rational argument and yet demands, of every human soul, a conclusion. The depth of pathos; of ”gut-level” instinctive feelings that I am experiencing when considering the number of human lives discarded since “Roe vs Wade,” like so much inconvenient trash, tells me that this is not a subject that my mind can decide, or even fully contain.

Since doing only a few hours of research on this subject, I firmly believe what before I had only sensed: that a person’s stand on abortion is more than just an expression of their opinion; it is an irrefutable confession of their heart, of their deepest code of ethics and metaphysics.

Abortion is a catalyst. While defying definition itself it defines all who seriously address it.

For years I tried to avoid this confrontation; this in-depth look at abortion. I realize now, that I was diverting my full gaze for so long because I knew that once I did look I would be forever defined: typed, marked, and sorted.

I was right. I looked and now I find myself transfixed in horror, unable to look away.

The carnage, alone, is reason enough for my horror: the tiny body parts mixed into the bloody mess sucked from a woman’s womb, multiplied millions of times; the salt-scalded remains of the saline abortions, little creatures ( we dare not call them babies) who writhed and struggled against impending death for as much as an hour before it mercifully overcame them.

This carnage is worse than witnessed in all of history’s wars put together: hands, heads, entrails, brains . . .

I cannot help but wonder if in that endless refuse there might be the fingers of what would have been tomorrow’s Mozart or Beethoven; the brains of the next century’s DaVinci or Einstein; the heart of a potential Lincoln or Gandhi.

Figuratively speaking, the stench of death is so strong in my nostrils,  that an internal alarm has been set off that I cannot still or ignore. Something is coming. Something we cannot hide from, try as we might. Even the trembling potential of a nuclear holocaust does not bring out this kind of psychic terror. It is a reaction much like animals exhibit before an impending earthquake or tornado. I find myself pacing the fences of my mind, back and forth, incessantly; I jump and startle skittishly; my sleep is disturbed. Of peace I can find none. There is no doubt left in my heart: Just as the prophets foretold—the whirlwind cometh.

It is so obvious that man, who chooses to excuse all his basest inclinations by defining himself as nothing more than just another animal, endowed with the troublesome awareness of his own existence, is now, so zealously quick to surgically remove himself from any further evolution of the human heart.  I would propose that whether it is God or Nature that is offended, it matters not. Man has flown in the face of powers greater than himself and assumed comprehension and authority he does not possess.

Thus, I see a climax to this drama looming that is equal to the most heart-wrenching Greek tragedy.

As the last act moves toward the final curtain fall, we find Humanity, the main character in this long and complicated choosing to sacrifice his own children, rather than share his life with them.

And thus, what began as a drama, intense with both despair and hope, is about to end, by Webster’s definition, as a catastrophe: a culminating event in a drama, especially a tragedy; a disastrous end, a total and ignominious failure.

Abortion: mere controversy of convenience . . . OR culminating catastrophe? If we persist in pretending it is the first, the second is inevitable.

–Colleen Harrison