As I assembled a bassinet in the section of our house that we have reallocated to the purpose of being a nursery, my thoughts came back to something that has been wondering through my head for months.  The enormity of the miracle that will soon enter the world is astounding.

April 28th.  That’s the date… the expected due date anyway.  For the last several months, we have not had to worry about our little one making it to full term.  The scares we have had with the pregnancies before had us in a constant state of paranoia even before the sub-chorionic hematoma.  After that, we slept on beds of nails just hoping for baby wiggles to make it through one more day.

Give us one more day, before we worry about the next one.

Our worry diminished when we could feel baby wiggles move, and we got further and further along.  Before we knew it, Alisha had a reassuring movement from Wiggles more times then she could count throughout the day.  The nickname “wiggles” could not have been better chosen.

Wiggles is so active in fact that Alisha is completing the fetal movement counts (number of felt movements measured, 10 within 1 hour) in between 2-10 minuets.

We had been so fearful we didn’t want to plan more then a couple days ahead, and now I find myself planning what car I am going to use to teach a 16 old child how to drive a stick, how to work on cars… you know, all the typical father-type stuff.

Then, I think of  one of the questions many asked me during the most active time for our website: Birthornot.com:

How are you going to explain this to your kid.

My answer to that, upon reflection, has never changed:  Straight-up honesty.  This will also be supported by records of events I have been keeping since before, during, and after the website went viral, strategy of the propagation of the site, and a book I am witting explaining all of this in great detail.  It is my intent to be able to give a copy of this book to my daughter so she can see what was going through our minds at the time.  Without boring you with all of them, there were components of this that went off exactly as planned like the site itself going viral at the time it did, the breadcrumbs left for some media agencies to test their reputable status, and the start of a discussion on the topic of abortion.

And once again without boring you with all of them, there were also components that did not go where we had planned like expecting people to read into it more then they just on the surface, the international attention was unforeseen, and we expected a deeper discussion.

And before I talk about more of my thoughts, remember that this entire topic requires two too tango.  I may express my opinions in this writing, but there are still the opinions of my wife’s which in some cases can differ from my own.

From the standpoint of one who is classified as “Pro-Life” (yes, believe it or not though I do disagree with the labels used.  I prefer “anti-abortion”), I expected others to see the ironic way to argue the hypocrisy of the “Pro-Choice” camp that my comments had illicited.

After all, I have documented evidence by over eleven thousand comments that overwhelmingly show how supportive people within the “Pro-Life” community are verses the bitter vitriol by people within the “Pro-Choice” community.  Even though many are not willing to look into this more then just on the surface, deep down it makes you look stupid if you support a woman’s “right to choose” but then disapprove of HOW the choice is made.  At no point does NARAL Pro-Choice-America tell you what is considered acceptable and unacceptable ways to make the “choice”.

Abortion is Legal, and there is no pro-choice organization willing to limit how a woman can come to the decision to have an abortion.  So, as long as it is legal, you could let a girl-scout cookie bake-off dictate the end of a life.  Those would be some pretty tasteless cookies, but so too is killing your neighbor to make your life more stable, or because its not a good time for him to live.

I submit that there are unacceptable ways to make the “choice”.

Look, those of us who are on the side of Anti-Abortion full well know that “Pro-Choice” does not mean “Pro-Abortion”.  Typically a “Pro-Choice” individual will argue that abortion should be kept legal for medical reasons, rape and incest despite these accounting for only 1.8% of abortions within the United States leaving about 98% of abortions in the United States as elective, including  socio-economic reasons or for birth control.

And while many Anti-Abortion people criticize me for saying abortions should remain legal for those 1.8% of the Hard-Case pregnancies, I still consider these cases to be murder.  You are ending the life of an individual for the sake of another.

If I were forced to make a “choice”… between the life of my Alisha or my unborn baby, I would make that choice in a way that would let us try again.  In doing so I would have to live with knowledge that I killed a human being so that another may live.  But this is the 1.8% of cases.  So that said, my wife and I both agree that the other 98% of abortions should not be happening.  Call me crazy, but I do not believe anyone should be aloud to end a human life for socio-economic convenience.

My big thing is (And remember, this is my opinion, and may verry from that of my wife)… if you do not want to have a baby, perhaps you should practice some conception control.  Ending the life of another human being for your convince is simply unacceptable.  Every sixth grader knows that mammals reproduce sexually.  And while I am a firm believer of sexual education, we are failing at Sex-Education if there are people who have sex without thinking becoming pregnant is a possible outcome.

Most accidental firearm discharges happen because the gun is thought to be unloaded, or those handling the gun are careless with it.  I would be willing to go out on a limb and say most accidental pregnancies happen for similar reasons.

Choosing to end the life of another human being for socio-economic convince, or so you can go to college, or land that promotion is just as silly to me as choosing to end the life of another human being based on an Internet poll.  What can I say… I am a fan of using irony to prove a point.

Next post, I’ll talk about some of the irony I’ve seen in all of this.




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