Hey, Dad, We've Got to Do Something!

“How can they do that?” Shaun’s fury squeezed through clenched teeth. His intensity caught me off guard. I guess my mind had grown accustomed to the meaning of “abortion” — a word my 10-year-old son had heard but never understood.

“Hey, Dad, we’ve got to do something.” The dreadful realization begged for action. “We need to get Christians to fight this, just like they did in the Civil War!”

Discuss abortion? Funny, I hadn’t discussed abortion, let alone connect the battle for the rights of the unborn with the war to free slaves. But the link was obvious to Shaun. In his simple view of the world, human life should be respected, because people are made in God’s image. Case closed. Battle lines drawn.

And to Shaun, it is clear which side of the battle Christians should fight. I couldn’t bring myself to tell him many 19th-century Christians defended the rights of slaveowners. They resisted the abolitionists who were trying to “legislate morality” by opposing slavery. Nor could I tell him that many modern-day Christians defend “a woman’s right to choose” or that his indignation would lump him with “religious right” pro-lifers who are trying to “legislate morality” by opposing abortion. He wouldn’t understand.

Why did my fourth-grader connect slavery and abortion when so many grown-ups miss it? Just like we fail to connect the dots between the holocaust, civil rights or the battles against assisted suicide, embryonic stem cell research and human cloning. To the average adult, each is an independent issue with no relation to the other. But to Shaun, he traces them to the same root. What is the saying. . . . “A little child will lead them”?

Those who opposed slavery did so because they believed blacks to be human and therefore worthy of dignity and freedom. Third Reich mass graves and gas chambers horrified the world because a line had been crossed that none thought possible — a crossing that began decades earlier with the seemingly unrelated acceptance of abortion, forced sterilization and eugenics. The seeds of Hitler’s harvest had been planted long before he came to power, cultivated by those who decided to slide their feet into shoes only God should wear.

Men and women who fought these things or for civil rights in the 1960s were not seen as heroes in their day. For the most part, they were viewed as troublemakers who refused to accept their culture’s standards of “acceptable.” Yet they did it because they believed human worth comes from divine decree, not human opinion.

Life is sacred The view that life is sacred once served as a sturdy fence around life’s playground. When children, the elderly and vulnerable realize that fence is gone, it creates anxiety. After all, some stranger might cross the line and do something dreadful to them.

It happened to Southern slaves. It happened to European Jews. It happens to unwanted babies. And it could happen to the handicapped, the aged and anyone else that some “elite” class judges to have a poor quality of life. Just study history. Once the fence is down and the line crossed, dreadful things occur.

Opposition to abortion, embryonic stem cell research, cloning, assisted suicide and genetic manipulation spring from the same root — a belief that human life in all forms and stages is sacred. Life is not a commodity to be used or discarded as we see fit. It is a gift from and for our Maker. Case closed. Battle lines drawn.

Shaun was right. “We’ve got to do something about this. We need to get Christians to fight this, just like they did with Abraham Lincoln in the Civil War!”

I’m sure Shaun would have supported abolitionists, hidden European Jews or marched with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. He gets it.

What about the rest of us?