Before I became a Christian, I never thought about politics.
I lived in my tiny corner of the earth, trying to fit my square soul into a world with no square holes.
Politics had no connection to my life.
Politics was something men in pressed suits discussed in their quiet offices while sitting in smooth leather chairs.
Politics was a class in college taught in dry tones by a teacher uninterested in real life.
Politics was law and lecture; papers and pens, and best left to the news reporters to figure out and tell me when they had all the answers.
After I became a Christian, everything changed.
Now I had a relationship with the One who made life, and His words illuminated the world for me.
When I watched the news, I no longer took it for granted that I was being told everything I needed to know.
Because now I had a premise.
I had a foundation from which everything was viewed.
I had truth.
And politics changed for me.
I saw it as something that affected me directly.
I saw it move the world and by extension, move me.
I saw the people involved and realized their decisions could make my life better or worse.
And I started paying attention.
I was startled with an epiphany about the politics of abortion.
Roe v. Wade somehow got relegated to a political platform and people stopped talking about the consequences.
Broken women, broken hearts, broken lives.
...and something much more insidious.
I had a conversation a little while ago with a woman on the subject of abortion.
She believed Roe v. Wade was a necessity for women.
"Why?" I asked.
"Because the government should never be able to tell women what to do with their bodies."
"Should the government allow its citizens to die before they're even born?"
"Don't be so dramatic," this woman admonished me. "A fetus isn't a citizen. It isn't even viable outside the womb."
"If the baby is viable," I asked. "Then would abortion be wrong?"
"Well," she said slowly. "That should be determined by a doctor."
I could sense a shift in her perceptions. She had never really had to think deeply about abortion before...it was always a campaign talking point, never a reality.
I understood. I had once done the same thing.
"Can't you tell me at what point in a pregnancy you think abortion should be illegal?" I asked.
"I don't think that's the issue," she said. "If we just prevented unwanted pregnancies in the first place, we wouldn't have to deal with abortion."
And with those words, she dismissed the uncomfortable place we all arrive at when we are forced to think about life and death.
Because it's so much easier to place abortion on that shelf with taxes and policies and let it move outside the realm of our daily lives.
But our daily lives will continue to play out until they bring us back to the same place.
When we are old and unwanted,
or disabled and unwanted,
or divorced and unwanted,
or just plain smelly and unwanted...our abortion legacy is waiting there to claim us.
We feel it in the fear permeating the country with the push for socialized medicine.
We know governments are incapable of dealing with individual needs. We know the weakest are the first to be sacrificed for the needs of the state.
They round us up and strike off the negative economic units first.
But even as our instinct for survival still thrives, we all feel the fear that it may be too late.
Because for the last forty years America has gotten so used to abortion, that we elected a man to the Presidency who voted to stop a law that would have prevented the worst form of abortion...infanticide.
The Born-Alive Act demanded that doctors and nurses make every effort to save the life of a baby that survived abortion. And it was based on the testimony of a nurse in a Chicago hospital who held these viable infants, unwilling to watch a living human being tossed into a utility room to die alone.
No one disputed her testimony except...Obama.
In the Illinois senate, Obama not only voted against the Born-Alive Act twice, but as chairmen of the Health and Human Services Committee, he made sure the bill never came up for a vote.It was not until he left Illinois for the U.S. Senate that the bill went for a vote and passed unanimously into law.
Unanimously.
When these facts came to light before the Presidential election, there was nary a peep of shock or dismay.
Not even from professing Christians.
And I knew America had lost its collective way.
There are many people like me, who stood in confusion while a man who admitted babies were a "punishment", was hailed as a hero in our land.
And yet now, with this healthcare bill scaring the daylights out of seniors and the rest of us who know what it will do...we get to see the effects of abortion.
Of what happens when our leadership defends it. When people vote for the hardest of hearts to protect it.
Do these people really think they would never be considered "unwanted" or looked on as a "punishment" one day?
Life is tricky that way. Some people call it 'karma'.
I call it a season of grief.
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