Day 36 - What will we allow to define our age?

This post is a repeat from my personal blog.  & i realized from the comments (you can read them HERE) that maybe "passion" is not the right word... but i'm stuck with the idea that on this issue, we need to gently encourage each other to do more.  Our silence is unkind.  It's unkind to the tiny ones who have lost their lives.  It's unkind to the women who would have choosen better if they knew they actually had a choice, and the fathers who might have found the courage.  It's unkind to the brothers and sisters who lost siblings, and the grandparents who should have stepped up.  It serves only to keep us in a miserable sort of self satisfied comfort, and it's time for that comfort to go.
 
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it's kinda horrifying. 
Painted in oil on canvas with rich, vivid colours... capturing the accepted inhumanity of the day...
The eighteenth century slave ships would throw over the dead and dying mid-voyage so they could collect the insurance for loss of "cargo".  If those shackled ones made it to shore alive, and then died - the cost would have been just. too. much.

"Prolife isn't my passion."

It needs to be... this is where the battle is for us - in this country - in this decade of this century.  Our humanity cries out for justice - and science backs up that cry...
Life - a person from the moment of conception with it's own unique DNA - someone worthy of protection. 
& there have been times in my life where i have done less - or more - for life.  There's no guilt, or condemnation - there's just the challenge, "right now... this season... today... what could you do?"  (Men, don't leave this to women.  We need you too.  Take courage, speak with gentleness and love.) 
i imagine there were many who murmured to the abolitionists, "The freedom of those slaves... it's not my passion..." or during the Holocaust, "i'm not even part Jewish..."  It's easy for us now to look back, and cry to the ones who should have spoken up against injustice, "it's so clear!"
When my grandchildren look at what our culture currently deems acceptable - and it's as revolting to them as the thought of throwing sold, half starved, abused, sick and dying human beings overboard mid-voyage is to me.... i want to tell them this loss of life broke my very heart too.


(*for those wondering, this is a jmw turner print _the slave ship_)

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by Stephanie

Pro- Life isn't just about abortion. It's family planning, teen STDs, divorce, fatherlessness, poverty, IVF, custody battles over embryos that are biologically the result of more than two DNA lines, immunization cultivated in a stew of materials resulting from abortion (to try to phrase it delicately). Abortion is the defining issue of our age, and we have lost, but that doesn't mean the tide can't turn and justice can reign one day for our culture just as it did for the black slaves, or the Jews at Auschwitz. I love this quote by Elizabeth Rundle Charles:

If I profess with the loudest voice and the clearest exposition, every portion of the truth of God except precisely that little point which the world and the devil are at that moment attacking, I am not confessing Christ, however boldly I may be professing Christianity. Where the battle rages, the loyalty of the soldier is proved; and to be steady on all the battlefield besides is mere flight and disgrace to him if he flinches at that one point."