My Mother’s Simple Answer

I remember it as if it were yesterday. I was 14 in 1973. The Supreme Court Decision making abortion legal in all 50 states throughout all 9 months of pregnancy was big news and was constantly on the radio and television. Frankly, I was bored with it all. I remember my mother and grandmother being alternatively sad and angry about it, but they were frequently that way about current events – my family was very political and very outspoken! Still there was something about this story that seemed to affect my mother a little differently from anything I had witnessed before. This news made her cry.

But at 14 I was still very innocent and very naive. I wasn’t even sure what an abortion was. Our radio station was always tuned to classical music, which meant that I received a healthy dose of NPR coming and going to school. From that I source I understood that this was a good decision somehow for me and other girls. It was something akin to getting the vote, at least from that perspective. I don’t remember anything being said about it at my Catholic High School, but the ideology I was picking up there had a lot of feminist overtones to it. I could be whatever, or do whatever I wanted to do, according to my teachers and my peer group. If that was so, then abortion, whatever that really was, sounded like a good thing.

I do remember sitting at my kitchen table at the old farmhouse, listening to yet another story about abortion in the news, and making the conscious decision that this was something I was going to make up my own mind about. I was going to consciously choose to make up my own mind and not just take a position because it was my mother’s position or my grandmother’s. If none of my friends, or any one at school thought this was such a big deal (or so it seemed to my young mind at the time), then why was my mother making such a big deal about this? Perhaps this was my own first logical fallacy then, an appeal to the majority. My mother must surely be wrong, if no one else feels as she does.

So I attempted to muster up an air of maturity and asked my mother point blank, “Well what’s so wrong about abortion anyway? Why do you think it’s so bad?”

My mother calmly and matter-of-factly answered me. “Because abortion is killing a little baby in its mother’s womb. It’s a baby.” I don’t remember that she over-dramatized it. In fact I don’t even think she quit eating her breakfast. But she said something that I had not heard in all of the rhetoric I had been exposed to, “baby.”

I consciously made up my own mind right on the spot. I would look for another issue to be on the opposite side of from my mother. On this issue, on abortion, she was right.

Years passed and I grew up to be very pro-life. The babies at the center of this issue were never lost in the pages and pages of words I read and listened to. It’s a baby.

And my mother’s simple answer set an example for me as well. I have explained this issue to my children in much the same way. It’s a baby. It’s a person. We don’t kill innocent people on purpose. When we keep those facts in mind, it makes all of the fallacies of the pro-abortion folks easy to see through and answer.

As a an aside, 20 years, later on the anniversary of the Supreme Court’s decision, I gave and received my most perfect example of those truths. My son Sam was born that day. He will be 15 tomorrow! I tell Sam all the time there is a purpose and a reason for that. IF he’s open to it, God will show him what it is. But in the meantime, Sam remains my best testimony and witness against R v. W. My mom thinks so too.

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