Mother and child communion
The mother and child communion. Nothing on earth is quite like it. Conception marks the beginning of life, but until a child's birth, the rest of us are outsiders. A mother becomes a mother long before the child's birth. She feels it in her bones. The mother gives life sustaining nourishment to the newborn, but this nourishment begins from a child's conception. Don't ever say that a preborn child is simply a clump of cells. Mom knows better, for that child is within her in a kind of earthly communion of love.
Fatherhood is something different. The child takes dad's last name, because, in a sense, the relationship must be asserted, and it must be prized, at least in any society that cares for children. In that sense, we must be intentional about fatherhood, something that is not happening in a world of baby daddies and same-sex marriage, which is no marriage at all, and by design leaves the child without a mom or dad.
Abortion is the worst of the worst, for it severs the best of the best, the intimate relationship between two people whose lives are organically linked. The cutting up of a small bodies results also in the cutting of souls that are left callous and cold. Sometimes, to support abortion, an anti-life activist will point to the fact that many children do no actually live to see their births. The very opposite reasoning should make abortion unthinkable in its cruelty; even as we all develop an inhuman insensitivity to the nine-month miracle in the making.
So, people watch movies about the likes of Jeffrey Dahmer or some awful shooters, and we wonder, how could there be in this world such evil? And yet, at the same time, they treat that which is the most precious, the mother and child communion, as if it were nothing, something disposable, unworthy of our attention, a blob of cells. Don't tell me about the horrors of our adult life, if you cannot begin to consider with awe the miracle that is the mother and child, and that most precious home from which every one of us began our lives.
The Rev. Dr. Peter Scaer is chairman and professor of Exegetical Theology and director of the M.A. program at Concordia Theological Seminary, Fort Wayne, Ind.
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Learn more about Planned Parenthood’s 2021 Annual Report with Dr. Michael New of the Charlotte Lozier Institute.
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