As a Practical Matter . . .

If you are a pro-life person, as you read this you may be saying to yourself, 'this guy is nuts.' What I refer to is a couple of events appearing in one edition of the local newspaper (Traverse City Record Eagle). The events reported included the arrest of a man for placing his girl friend's one month old baby in a microwave and burning the child to death (or at least attempting to do so). I was so appalled by the first paragraph I couldn't finish the rest of the story. Another story told of how a mother and her boy friend repeatedly beat her three year old child to death in an attempt to discipline the child. There is no one on this planet that could convince me that these children would not have been better off not being born in the first place. It breaks my heart to think about the life these children had here on earth. I understand the arguments of both sides completely in the important and ungoing public debate about who should decide whether to terminate a pregnancy. Could these two tragic children have possibly been the product of wanted and planned pregnancies? I think not. Even in this pro-choice era, there are a lot of pressures brought to bear against women, who for one reason or another, find themselves pregnant when they didn't want to be pregnant. Thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of children are born into living situations which are less than optimal in terms of a welcoming committee for the introduction into life. The cost of bearing children, financially and emotionally, is great and I respectfully submit that it should not be a governmental decision that dictates the bearing of that child when, as a practical matter, it is not feasible to do so. The damage to the lives of children do not need to be as extreme as the stories I have presented above to inflict real suffering on the product of unwanted pregnancies. I know that there are many examples of children born in 'delicate' situations who have gone on to fame and fortune, arising from miserable life situations in the doing, but, again, as a practical matter, doesn't it really make sense to allow the woman carrying such a child to assess the circumstances and react to those cirumstances rather than create a blanket rule?