Why does any man keep chopped up baby parts in jars?
And why cover for a monster?
Gosnell
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Category Archives: infanticide
Disfigured vs. Transfigured
This story will seem disjunctive to you:
It is late in the season for chicks. We are at a friend’s farm. A very kind friend. A good listener. We are recovering from a great blow to the heart of the family
My young son finds an egg in the chicken coop. He cradles it gently in his hands and runs into the kitchen where several large goose eggs are incubating.
A month later little Biscuit is born. Hatched, if you will.
My son saved that one small feathered life from being scrambled. A small story.
I have been thinking about what it is we are and what we are becoming. None of us will stay in our eggs forever. We will break out to splendor or be cracked over a waiting pot.
Mark 9:2 (NIV)
After six days Jesus took Peter, James and John with him and led them up a high mountain, where they were all alone. There he was transfigured before them.
I am going to unspool this strange story tomorrow. But for tonight only this–are you being disfigured or transfigured by the small events of your life? Your secret fears? You abiding passions?
When Jesus is revealed in secret his splendor is unforgettable.
When you and I are exposed for our true and eternal selves, what will people see?
Splendor or the pot?
Slaughterhouse Delicacy
So. I gather from social media there is a trial going on.
Kermit Gosnell and his employees are on trial for a variety of interesting (and thoroughly ghoulish) crimes. What has struck most of us is how quiet this story is. Really? Obama’s taxes are more news-worthy than butchering live babies for profit?
I tracked down one late-breaking article and was amazed by the delicacy of the description. These people were in the business of murdering viable babies and the language is confined to the equivalent of an embroidery lesson. Snip? Snip what, pray tell?
Poor little ones. Even now their squalid murders are treated with a subtle linguistic delicacy. You may be sure their deaths were anything but a sewing lesson.
The article exonerates the employees of this “clinic” by claiming they could not find other jobs. I am positive that was a defense in post-war Europe. What to do when only Auschwitz is hiring?
Mary Elizabeth Williams and the politics of death
I read MEW’s screed about abortion today. It was a difficult read.
As a self-identified pro-life “wing nut” who actually believes that all life is precious, I found her unapologetic stance painful and tragic.
Ms. William’s candor and vitriol were difficult for me to read….because she reveals the selfishness and myopia at the heart of the abortion-on-demand movement. Make no mistake, abortion is a money industry, just like guns or drugs. But to aggressively insist that mother’s have an unfettered right to kill their own offspring at will? Her words reveal the desperate lack of value placed on the lives of the very young.
No society is civilized when it drops it’s protective force for the young and vulnerable. We are now a society that registers horror over the natural predatory nature of cats but congratulates itself on the termination of wee humans.
When children are openly treated as objects by their own mothers we are all lost at sea.
…our hearts as empty as our words.
When We Look Away
How could any sentient person suggest that the Sandy Hook massacre was fake?
When I see the pictures of the victims I know that their families are lost in a sea of grief and pain. Not only do they miss their loved ones, they are caught in a vicious web of the beautiful life taken and the bloody end.
Yes. The pictures are there–a crime scene where there should have been snack time. The reality of what it takes to rob a person of her life with a deadly spray of bullets.
If we really want to make our families safer we must face the bodies of our dead.
And perhaps face the cost of our pornography of violence.
Head injuries
The pictures are often similar–tiny faces surrounded by tubes, bruised little faces and bodies.
Shaken babies.
So heartbreaking, so preventable.
In 2007 my father died as the result of head injuries from a helicopter crash. What happened to him was painful, traumatic and deadly. But he knew the risks.
I compare the last stage, the dying stage, of my father’s life to the pictures I see of small children abused to death by caregivers.
No helicopters
No choice
No escape
And no reason on earth why we should look the other way while more than 5 children a day are abused to death in America.
Shame on us.
Do something
The Pittsburgh painted dogs
I like to think there is a multiverse somewhere where African painted dogs gorge themselves exclusively on dandelions.
And another where a hapless mother keeps her grip.
And another where the boy stays away from the railing.
But in one multiverse everything happens the same except there are no lawyers and the adults are very brave.
It is as though they had been training for this their whole lives! They spring Into action.
One adult shepherds the children away.
One dials 911
One hollers for the zookeepers
And every other able bodied human leaps over the rails and starts punching
Kicking
Yelling
Wielding sticks
Whacking wild dogs with cell phones
Cameras
Loose change
In the wild brouhaha that ensues one of these brave souls pulls the child away quickly
Hurt, but still living.
We don’t believe in these brave, fictitious people
Why revenge is not sweet
For at least. a few months after I found out my children had been hurt by their adopted brother I would admit to other people that I had a desire to take him to a roadhouse down the street, announce his crimes and then close the door on him. I do not admit this with any pride, I tell this story because it is one step toward forgiveness.
There are things he could have done and can still do that are worse.
There are things he did which keep me up at night searching for answers.
And all humans are a rum bunch. Let’s be honest.
I am tired of reading about children being hurt. The more prolonged and grievous the hurt, the less I want to face it. But I do and I pray.
And I understand the wild and violent response people have toward the disembodied child abuser. The only problem is our wild cries for blood are not effective. And our response to real abusers is often muted and myopic.
My first question is–why not shut down NASA?
I know, you worry about all the unemployed astronauts, I would too if I did not already have a plan. Let’s take these extremely smart people preoccupied with the elusive quest for martian scat and put them onto the task of keeping children safe–ending child abuse.
You know–like the repair scene in Apollo 13 only with children not tubes.
Stop telling me you want some hairy inmate to put a beat down on those who harm children, call your congressman and tell him you want infanticide eradicated. Call your pastor and tell him you want to start a parenting group. Call the police if you hear a baby crying in a way that suggests abuse, not gas.
Do something to change the world. Because if you are leaving all this to the lawless to sort out, well don’t be surprised when all that is left is the wreckage of a country that might once have been safe for children.
Dear Krim Family
My heart aches for you. I know your lives have been thrown into the darkest tunnel. You are constantly in my thoughts and prayers. Words fail.
There is an Old Testament story that keeps coming to my mind. A woman whose family was executed to stop a war sits over the bodies of her loved ones warding of the birds.
It is one of the bleakest images of grief–all that remains is her lonely figure on a hilltop. I wish I could ward off the birds of memory seething around you and your beautiful, heartbroken family.
May my words be like hands
Warding off the birds
Jessica Ridgeway, Child Abuse, and Abortion
If you were able to go back to the language of the original abortion debate circa 1973, you might be surprised at the language people used. One key term stands out–child. Another is baby. Baby and child were the terms used in the 1960s and 70s to describe the victims of abortion. They were not called fetuses (which is a Latin word for “little one”)
They were, to people on both sides of the argument–human babies.
Now, 30 years later, the dismal, dehumanizing effects of abortion have begun to be evident in the crimes against children our society sees now.
I say sees now, but I mean looks the other way.
I know this because it has happened to my children as well as precious children like Toryn Buckman or Jessica Ridgeway. When children are the victims of crime people do not want to read, see, or feel the agony that comes with abuse. As a child advocate I have been told by pediatricians and social workers to shut up.. Talking about this makes people uncomfortable.
The fundamental issue in abortion is only wanted children have value
That means the unwanted ones….(still have value, we just refuse to acknowledge it). A baby conceived by rape is still a valuable human being. Same with girls in general. Same with Down’s babies. All of us have the same priceless measure in the eyes of God.
But for 30 years we have been convincing ourselves that millions of beautiful children aren’t valuable.
Not true.
It has created a deadly lapse in our collective thinking. We would rather blame the parents of crime victims for what has been done to them. We would rather believe it could not happen to us. They made a fatal mistake we will avoid– we will make more money, live in the right place, our kids will be smarter than theirs.
None of this is logical nor does it keep our children safe.
If we are ever to make our country safe again for our children we must see all children as precious– more precious than our jobs, cellphones, free time. And most of all–more precious than our lethal complacency.
Carrying Light 