In one week we Christians, genuine and cultural, will celebrate the birth of the Christ Child. For cultural Christians the celebration is traditional, festive and nostalgic. For genuine Christians it is all that, and more importantly the recognition that, “…the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.” (John 1:14)
God chose Mary, full of grace, to be the vessel through whom the Messiah would come. This girl of 14, 15 or 16 responded to the Father, by way of Gabriel, by saying,
“Behold, I am the servant of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word.”
At a point in space and time this girl, pregnant, but not by her betrothed, very well could have suffered death by stoning for such a sin. Yet she demonstrated the faith of the mightiest of God’s saints by accepting whatever God had planned for her, not yet knowing that Gabriel would also be visiting Joseph to instruct him in what his response to her pregnancy should be. Later during Mary’s visit to her cousin Elizabeth, their conversation became a poetic expression of how acutely aware each woman was of the baby that already lived within her womb.
“In those days Mary arose and went with haste into the hill country, to a town in Judah, and she entered the house of Zechariah and greeted Elizabeth. And when Elizabeth heard the greeting of Mary, the baby leaped in her womb. And Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit, and she exclaimed with a loud cry, ‘Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb! And why is this granted to me that the mother of my Lord should come to me? For behold, when the sound of your greeting came to my ears, the baby in my womb leaped for joy. And blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her from the Lord (Luke 1: 39-45).’”
For Mary and Elizabeth there is no doubt of the humanity of the unborn.
In contrast, we have come to a point in these post modern times where, despite the advances in technology which allow us to see the developing baby inside the womb, and to observe him sleeping, sucking or responding to noises in the outside world, we have hardened our hearts and we refuse to credit the developing child with humanity
And that leads me to the whole point of this post. According to the following story, a woman in Virginia gave birth to a full term baby in her home and then strangled the child while it was still attached to the umbilical cord. According to Virginia law this precludes the authorities from charging the woman with any crime since the child was technically still part of her body.
The second link is a pertinent commentary on this story.
http://www2.newsadvance.com/lna/news/local/article/mother_wont_be_charged_in_newborn_babys_death/22371/e
http://www.catholicculture.org/commentary
The birth of Jesus was pivotal in history and the first step toward the ultimate restoration of the shattered relationship between God and man. The angelic proclamation on the night of the birth in Bethlehem saying “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace to men of good will!” (Luke 2:14), is the official announcement that now there will be peace on Earth. Not peace between men, but peace between God and man because of the arrival at the appointed time of the Father’s only Son as the mediator between God and man. Thankfully Mary’s embrace of this untimely (for her) arrival has made it possible for the salvation that came to the Jew first and then the Gentiles.
Tim Keller on Redefining Work
55 minutes ago
Since the Catholic Culture link does not take you to the actual commentary, I have posted the whole article here.
ReplyDeletemy body, my choice
By Diogenes | December 18, 2009 7:13 AM
A woman in Virginia suffocated her newborn last week. Because the mother and child were still connected by the umbilicus and placenta at the time the former dispatched the latter, the act is considered no different from clipping a toenail. You go, girl!
Momma is free as the breeze:
“In the state of Virginia as long as the umbilical cord is attached and the placenta is still in the mother, if the baby comes out alive the mother can do whatever she wants to with that baby to kill it,” said Investigator Tracy Emerson. “She could shoot the baby, stab the baby. As long as it’s still attached to her in some form by umbilical cord or something it’s no crime in the state of Virginia.”
The news story attributes the authorities’ inability to prosecute the murder to a “loophole in state law.” But it isn’t a loophole. It’s a carefully crafted legal fiction whose sole purpose is to establish the unborn child as something less than human in order to permit its mother to kill it. The logic is no different from that of the D&X (Partial Birth Abortion) procedure, whereby four-fifths of the baby is delivered outside the birth canal while the skull is confined inside the cervix in order to empty its contents. Surgically.
Note that if a woman wanted to give birth to a healthy child and her obstetrician did what the murderess did in the Virginia episode or what the abortionist does in a D&X, that obstetrician would be sued if he acted through incompetence or charged with murder if he acted in malice. What makes a human person a human person, according to our law, is whether its mother wishes it to be -- at least up to such time as it's alive and kicking apart from and independently of her.
Let me put it simply. No one present at a birth and gazing at the emergent flesh -- not the nurse, not the doctor, not the recorder, not the father -- knows whether he's looking at a baby or looking at surgical waste. No one knows whether it’s a new patient, citizen, child (which he has to tend to), or whether it's a mass of superfluous tissue (which he has to dispose of). Until the arbitrary law arbitrarily kicks in, it's acey deucy: mother’s choice decides all.
Our society tolerates the gross incoherence of these legal fictions because the fictions themselves are necessary lies, necessary to the public justification of abortion. You'll notice that even the journalists find the business difficult to report without knotting themselves in contradictions. Of this case they write, "Because the mother and baby were still connected by the umbilical cord and placenta, state law does not consider the baby to be a separate life." They're saying, in short, state law does not consider the baby to be a baby.
Put that way, something looks wrong.