I have a brother who is three years older than me. On the day that I was born, Dr. Green declared to my mother, “It’s another boy.” Earlier today I watched this video clip in which a similar announcement is made, but in a completely different context. Instead of the celebration of a birth, it is the devilish declaration of a medical assistant staring at the parts of a tiny, dismembered corpse in an over-sized petri dish.
I recently celebrated my forty-second birthday, which means that I was born in 1973, the same year that Roe v. Wade was passed. To state it coarsely, “I survived Roe v. Wade.” This is not to imply that my parents considered abortion, because that thought never entered their minds, but for over a generation a war has been waged against the womb. Dr. Ginde’s ironically dark statement about baby parts being “war-torn” in the video clip is gruesomely true.
I have a son who is three years old. He is another boy in this world, but not just another boy. He has a name, a delightful personality, and real relationships with family and friends. He is known. He is known by his mother, siblings, and me, and he knows us. Even more, he knows and is known by Jesus his Savior and King. My son has a soul.
I can’t help but wonder what the boy in the petri dish would have been like; his looks, his personality. He wasn’t just another boy either. He was/is a person; created to be known, to live life, to be loved, and, quite possibly, be a means for propagating more life. Who might have he married? What might have he named his son had one been born to him? The boy was fearfully and wonderfully made (Ps. 139:14) in the image of God (Gen. 1:26), and he, too, has a soul – as do millions of other boys and girls who have been aborted. May God have mercy upon him. May God have mercy upon them all.