This year’s election will have profound impacts on the future of abortion in America. One cannot reduce the power of a president to influence the issue. At national and international policy levels, the president can stand against the injustice of legal infanticide or encourage it. And, without a doubt, the next president will help set the course for the next 30 years of Supreme Court decisions.
I know I’ve posted on this issue a few times already this year, but this article got me thinking:
A mother who decided to abort her son because he may have inherited a life-threatening kidney condition is overjoyed that he survived the procedure.
Jodie Percival of Nottinghamshire, England, said she and her fiancee made the decision to abort baby Finley when she was eight weeks pregnant.
Percival’s first son Thane died of multicystic dysplastic kidneys — which causes cysts to grow on the kidneys of an unborn baby — and her second child Lewis was born with serious kidney damage and currently has just one kidney, the Daily Mail reported.
“I was on the (birth control pill) when I became pregnant,” Percival, 25, said. “Deciding to terminate at eight weeks was just utterly horrible but I couldn’t cope with the anguish of losing another baby.”
A short time after the abortion, Percival felt a fluttering in her stomach. She went to the doctor for a scan and discovered she was 19 weeks pregnant.
“I couldn’t believe it,’ Percival said. “This was the baby I thought I’d terminated. At first I was angry that this was happening to us, that the procedure had failed. I wrote to the hospital, I couldn’t believe that they had let me down like this.
“They wrote back and apologized and said it was very rare,” she added.
Dr. Manny Alvarez, managing health editor for FOXNews.com, said Percival’s situation is actually quite common.
“Women that have early terminations in weeks six, seven and eight, many times the pregnancy is so small that doctors miss removing the baby,” Alvarez said. “The danger is that the failed attempt can damage the baby. That is why these patients who get early terminations need follow-ups.”
Another scan a week later confirmed the baby also had kidney problems, but doctors told the couple the baby was likely to survive, so they decided he deserved another chance at life.
In November, Finley was born three weeks premature. He had minor kidney damage but is expected to lead a normal life.
As America and the world at large descend the long spiral down to the end of this age, life will become less and less valuable. People will guard their savings, the environment, and their national pride but fewer and fewer human beings will do what God has commanded: to love everything He has put before them. To love their neighbor, husband, wife, child, father, mother as they love themselves. We are witnesses to cruelty that the Nazis were scorned for and it will get worse. Now is the time to get our lives straight and be light and salt to the people around us so that the hearts of those who can feel God’s presence will not grow hard.
Sugar Land Steve
June 6th, 2008