This is the first photograph that was ever taken of me. A few hours after I was born on March 31st, 1974.
A lot of people over the years have remarked that I was the brightest and most alert baby that they had ever seen. That they had never beheld a newborn who had a smile like that. One person told me that even then it was like I was plotting mischief upon an unsuspecting world.
Keep that photo in mind while I openly ponder some recent developments.
A few days ago Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey signed legislation that radically expands abortion in that state. It is now perfectly legal to kill an absolutely normal and healthy baby in the womb immediately before it would be naturally delivered.
Massachusetts is now the twelfth state as well as Washington D.C. that allows abortion without limits.
I used to believe that a woman had "a right to choose". That was when I was much younger and far more foolish. I started coming around to the true horror of abortion about the time that I started college. I now regret that I ever supported the abortion procedure, but hey: we live, we learn.
My stance today could not be more wildly the opposite direction. There is not only the life of the child that is exterminated during abortion, but there is a terrible social cost also. When human life is judged "inconvenient" then anything becomes permissible. A civilized society is supposed to be one that places a value upon the human soul. But for more than half a century in this country that value has been horrendously diminished. Human life has become something practically disposable. What were once atrocities have become an accepted part of daily existence.
Abortion may not have started it. Ultimately that is the fault of fallen human nature. But abortion certainly has exacerbated it. As Mother Teresa said when she accepted the Nobel Peace Prize, the greatest destroyer of peace in this world is abortion. If a mother can kill her unborn child, then what is there to keep me from killing you or you from killing me? There is absolutely nothing in between to keep that from happening.
So now it is legal in too many places to kill a child just before it would be born. And the cold, cold rationale that I have read, from quite a few people, is that such abortion isn't ending a human life at all. The reasoning is that a fetus only becomes fully human when it takes its first breath.
Let's be clear on what they are saying. If a baby is moments away from being born but still attached to the mother by the umbilical cord, it's subject to abortion. Only when it's outside the mother and breathing on its own, is it to be considered a human being.
Huh.
I might have some things to say about that. Actually, I do have some things to say about that.
Look at that picture again. The sweet little cherub who had his whole life ahead of him. The miracle of life. Among the most beautiful of the experiences of the human condition.
That picture however does not convey how much things could have been very different.
There were complications during my delivery. A Caesarian had to be performed. And when I came out of my mother I was not breathing. I was not moving. I was not doing anything.
I was just an immobile infant in the delivery room, unresponsive to any stimuli whatsoever. Not crying. Life's first breath was not entering my lungs.
According to too many abortion advocates, I was dead. A "non-viable tissue mass". Something that could have and maybe should have been discarded. If I wasn't able to breathe on my own, then by what right could it be said that I could claim to be alive at all?
Dr. Carl Weatherly, an amazing man, saw that I wasn't breathing. He went to work immediately, doing everything in his power to compel me to take my first gasp of air.
One minute passed. Two.
Three.
Four and five minutes, still no breathing.
At six minutes without oxygen the cells of the brain begin to die. With each passing moment the chances of irreversible brain damage increase.
Seven minutes. Eight.
Nine.
And finally, twelve minutes after being born, I began to breathe on my own.
That's twelve minutes that I was, for all intents and purposes according to the pro-abortion side, a dead clump of inanimate tissue.
Dr. Weatherly and his team pulled off a miracle that Sunday night. Or rather, I believe that God used them to pull off a miracle. I was breathing on my own. And a short while later the photograph you see above was taken.
Maybe I'm biased, but I don't think the baby in that picture was someone to discard as already dead just because he didn't come out of his mother crying as a baby normally should.
When I was first told the story of my birth, I resolved to myself that I would do what I could to make my life count for something. That has taken me down many a strange and winding road. I have had to confront a lot of bad things in my time. But there have also been many wonderful and magnificent experiences also. Sometimes I wonder if I've lived as fully as I had wanted. Friends and family who know me best have told me that I've taken as big a bite as anyone they have ever seen. Some good people were committed to making me survive that night. I have done what I can to honor them.
And now, I merely want others, who have not yet taken their first breath, to have the same chance of that full life as I have been able to enjoy.
That some among us do not believe that those unborn children do not deserve that chance, and applaud the notion as did Governor Healey and the "healthcare workers" surrounding her this week as she signed the law, is nothing other than pure evil. It is something that hearkens back to the sacrifice of infants on the altar of Moloch. The ancient Israelites ended up paying a terrible price for their idolatry.
We cannot thrive, or even survive, as a culture that celebrates death. It is impossible.
And it shouldn't take a dead man to state that obvious fact.
