Happy Abortion Day!

I didn't get much opportunity to spend time on the key board today because of that pesky day job, but my blogging buddy Mike, over at Let's Think About That works in advertising and his basic responsibility is to hang around the agency and wait for the awards to pour in. So he had ample time to give some thought about this tragic day in American History.

His post is titled, Happy Abortion Day! and it deserves your attention. Here are a couple of paragraphs:

Today, January 22, is the 36th anniversary of Roe v. Wade. Let’s all celebrate the bloody deaths of 49, 551,703 (and counting) unborn children since 1973!

Oh, I know what you're thinking.

This is going to be a sanctimonious, sarcastic rant about the evils of abortion from another Bible-thumping wacko.

Well, relax. Because I’m like you: just a guy who grew up assuming abortion ought to be as legal and available as possible because, heck, if I ever got into a predicament, I’d want an easy out. I’m young, I reasoned. I want to have some fun with the ladies minus any worries. Plus, like you, I grew up watching all those weird people on TV waving their protest signs in front of abortion clinics. Freaks. Look at them.

Then three things happened. I grew up. I started using my brain. And one day, my lovely wife told me she was pregnant. This was great news. We wanted a baby. Life was good.

Life. That’s a stubborn word.

For me, the prospect of being a Dad made me think, and I mean really think, about some heady things, among them life, death, God, the future, the afterlife. Whoops, sorry. I said the ‘L’ word twice. And the ‘G’ word too. How uncomfortable. Anyway, it wasn’t just the bulge of my wife’s belly that got me thinking on a deeper level about the rightness or wrongness of abortion. There were the numerous sonograms with the thump, thump, thump of my daughter’s beating heart. And the fuzzy grey photos of her sucking her thumb in the womb. What I found especially moving was the occasional little arm or leg shifting around in plain sight when I looked at my wife’s protruding stomach. When I put my hand on my wife’s tummy, it sometimes felt like I was shaking hands with my soon-to-be first daughter.

I had to admit, that thing in there wasn’t a just blob of tissue. It wasn’t just a fetus. It was my child. The thought of some anonymous doctor in a non-descript office reaching in and puncturing my daughter’s skull with a sharp pair of scissors, well, that thought became unacceptable to say the least.

There's more at Mike's blog...go there!