Babylon Bee CEO Seth Dillon recently appeared on Joe Rogan’s podcast and did a great job of holding up the pro-life side against what will apparently be the main pro-abortion argument now: What about this hypothetical teen-or-pre-teen girl who got pregnant as the result of a horrific rape? Are you going to force her to give birth to that baby?! Huh?! Huh?!!
If you are pro-life, that’s the unspoken context of any discussion with pro-abortion people. You have to justify imposing this horrible affliction on a woman. Even the most hard-core, abortion-is-murder true believers feel subconscious sheepishness on this point because we’ve spent our lives marinating in a culture that believes children are an undesirable hassle.
We’ve got to reverse this attitude. Part of the battle to transform America into a pro-life country is to re-establish the idea that children are not a burden but a blessing. Not just any old blessing, either–one of the greatest blessing God gives.
On an individual level, children are a blessing to parents–“Like arrows in the hands of a warrior are children born in one’s youth.” They’re a blessing to the extended family, they’re a blessing to the community, and as you continue to widen your perspective, they’re a blessing to civilization. More people, more images of God, are a good thing.
We’re learning this truth more and more every day, even if you don’t want to argue from a religious perspective. Throughout history, mankind has fought each other for access to resources. But as we proceed further into the information age, we’re finding out that the only resource that matters is human ingenuity. All those miraculous achievements that the “I bleeping love science!” crowd loves so much, where did those come from? Aliens? Super-smart birds? Science needs scientists, and breakthrough ideas have to come from the brains of people.
Those people were all babies once, and yet we act like babies are detritus that can be tossed out without consequences, when in fact every abortion snuffs out a little bit of our future in a way that can never be recovered. If we could transform the assumption that babies are nothing but trouble, it would transform the whole debate.
To demonstrate my point, let’s consider this spin on pro-aborts’ favorite hypothetical: a fourteen year old girl is raped, a heinous and unconscionable act for which the rapist is duly punished (and punishment for child rapists is something we need to delve into more when pro-abortionists bring up this kind of scenario). But for some unexplainable reason, as a result of his crime the rapist left behind a pile of gold bars.
Now imagine someone–someone with a pro-abortion frame of mind–responded to this by saying, “We have to get rid of that gold! We have to throw it away so that this girl won’t have to live with a reminder of this horrible crime!”
Someone else might say, “Well, can we just give it away to somebody else?” And they would respond, “No! Unconscionable! It must be destroyed so that no one can ever benefit from it! It was created in tragedy and therefore must be completely obliterated!”
And then a reasonable person, even one with the utmost sympathy for the rape victim, would say, “Well, yeah, but… that’s gold, man.”
And it is; it is gold. If you think the comparison breaks down because babies come with so many problems, that only demonstrates how thoroughly we’ve been conditioned to view money as all upside and children as all downside. Sudden wealth comes with plenty of its own problems, especially if it’s in the form of a pile of gold bars (take one to Walmart and see how far it gets you). But nobody would even consider just throwing it out, even if it resulted from a heinous act. We wouldn’t consider it an additional punishment; we’d consider it a (golden) silver lining.
It all depends on how we choose to look at children. Right now, not to put too fine a point on it, our society hates children. We look at them as a net negative, robbing us of time, resources, and opportunities. But that could not be further from the truth. They are the very embodiment of time, resources, and opportunities. As the great philosopher Whitney Houston taught us, they are the future. And if the debate becomes about whether or not we should kill the future, the pro-life side wins every time.