Tonight, I was looking at photos of the March for Life. As I was scrolling through them, Ivan, my six-year-old, came into the room.
“What’s that, Daddy?” He asked, as he looked over my shoulder.
I found myself wondering if I should tell him. But then again, why not? Evil exists. It’s part and parcel of the world he is growing up in. I tried to find a way to tell him gently.
“Well,” I said. “There are some pregnant mommas who don’t think they can take care of their babies. So they have an operation that makes their babies go away. They don’t like to think about it, but that operation kills their babies.”
“But why?” he asked, looking confused. “Why would they do that?”
I pointed to my wife, standing in the kitchen, 8 months pregnant.
“You know how mommy has a baby in her tummy? We don’t know him yet. We haven’t ever met him. We’ve seen some pictures, but it’s not the same as when they’re born, is it? These mommies who do this, they don’t think about it. They don’t know their babies. It’s easier for them not to think about it because they haven’t seen their babies yet. And unfortunately, our government — the people in charge — they say it’s OK to do this. It’s not against the law. So all these people you see in the pictures? They have something like a parade. They all go and March in Washington to tell the people in charge that it’s not OK to let people do this.”
“But why would they allow that?” He asked, his face transforming into an angry scowl. “That’s SO MEAN!”
“I don’t know, Ivan. I really don’t understand it.”
At that moment, his mother called him to dinner, so he left the room. I didn’t. I just sat there, tears welling up in my eyes. How do you explain to your children that in this country, a country that is supposed to represent freedom and justice for all, it’s legal to exterminate children in the place where they should be safest? How do you tell a child who knows nothing of motherhood except unconditional love that there are mothers willing to end their babies’ lives, just like that?
It’s impolitic to talk about this at all, of course. I can’t have a discussion this rational with many adults, because somehow we’ve come to a place in our national discourse where we have to “agree to disagree” over whether dismembering an unborn child is murder. Both sides of the argument have heard the same positions laid out again and again, countless times. It’s a rhetorical war, a sort of endless cultural détente, that keeps us civil and goes nowhere.
But children know. Show a 2-year-old a picture of a 12-week-old fetus and ask them to tell you what it is, and they immediately point and say, “Baby!” Their minds are simple. They have not yet developed the capacity for guile, for nuancing away the truth of a thing. A toddler will come right out and ask you why you’re so fat. A kindergartener will tell you that your cooking tastes bad. They don’t mean anything by it, they just don’t know any better. They see reality for what it is and call it that way.
I mourn for this country. I mourn for a people who can’t see what a six-year-old boy can see. I mourn for adults who have become so intellectually dishonest that they refuse to acknowledge the humanity of a helpless baby.
How can you explain such incomprehensible evil to the noble mind of a child? It’s not the kind of thing they can process. There is no room in their way of thinking for such self-deception.
I wish they didn’t have to know. But it will be their fight soon enough. Evil thrives when it is hidden. It needs to be dragged out into the light. They are the second-generation survivors of Roe v. Wade, just as I am the first. 40 years of this senseless bloodshed in what was once the greatest nation on Earth?
How will we survive it? I don’t know for sure. But the people who love children keep having them, and the people who want the freedom to kill them don’t. Maybe it will just come down to a demographic equation. I can’t say. But the truth is on our side. We can’t lose this battle forever. I give humanity too much credit.
After all, children can see the truth. Maybe if we teach them now, they won’t forget it when they’re old enough to complicate things.
Originally published at the author’s website on Janury 25, 2013. Images courtesy of Alicia Skojec Photography
Some who watch old movies remember Patricia Neal.
You’re a good Dad, Steve. Your kids are blessed to have you.
You are so right. I have never met a child who could in any way grasp the ‘why’ of abortion as good right or necessary or even part of freedom of choice. To children, abortion is a travesty beyond understanding.
Then, please, what is the answer to the question posed in the title of the article?
Old enough to cause another to or to become pregnant, of one’s own volition, and not be willing to take responsibility before God for one’s actions
So around middle school.
If you want a number, I would say 14.
In my experience, 14 is an irrational age.
Justifying abortion at any age is an irrational act.
And yet more than 55 million legal abortions in the USA since Roe v. Wade.
And in the time I have been a Catholic, the last 20 years, we have had a majority of professing Christians who were Catholic in the House of Representatives and on the Supreme Court. There is hell to pay for all of us, when the best and brightest among God’s own can’t or won’t slow the tide of the flow of the blood in the slaughter of the innocents. #noexcuse
The title of the article poses a question for which there is no answer for there is no rationale for the deliberate destruction of the unborn.
There should be no answer. Still, people rationalize abortion all the time. If it weren’t so, we wouldn’t have this ungodly law.
So my question is: at what age is it possible for a person to lose their natural capacity to recognize that a baby is a baby, and start justifying their actions by rationalizing away the humanity of that baby through vagueries of science and euphemism?
But that’s way too long of a title.
Well, it would seem to me that it is at the age where one begins to truly comprehend and feel peer pressure, has greater access to science and euphemism, is interested in sexual engagement/opposite sex and is capable of being found with an “unwanted” pregnancy. It seems that high-school age would be the beginning of such an age. This is when children stop being yet believe they are adults, despite the vast evidence to the contrary. This is that crazy in-between time of utter self-absorption and maturing bodies while possessing sufficient intellect to both engage in absolute denial and to argue accordingly….not having full knowledge, but sufficient to make one “dangerous.”