October Baby

I just came home from watching the newly released film, October Baby, which tells the story of a young woman who finds out she is the survivor of a failed abortion. The story was gripping and poignant.

As I walked away from this movie, touched by it's story of tragedy, forgiveness and healing, it reminded me of why I fight to end the legalized murder of unborn children. Without offering too much of a spoiler, the young abortion survivor in the movie seeks after and eventually meets her birth mother. We might think that such an event would be extremely rare. For a woman who had an abortion to eventually meet the child she aborted is uncommon, primarily because most abortions don't fail, but are, tragically, most always successful.

But if we were to think that such an event is rare, we would be dead wrong. Even as Christians, we often forget that this earthly life we live is just a vapor. We were created with eternity in our hearts, so that this life we live in the flesh is just the beginning of an eternal existence in one world or another.

So when a baby's life on this earth is extinguished by her very own mother (and many times with the complicity of her father) that's not the end of it. The pain doesn't stop when that tiny little girl finally succumbs to the bloody implements of the butcher. That little girl lives on, though not in the world where she was supposed draw her first breath, but in the next world we sometimes call eternity.

These mothers are taught to think that if they end their child's life early, their baby will never know what they missed and that they'll be spared the pain of being unwanted and unloved. But we should not be so deceived. These little children will know for all of eternity what their parents did to them, and will have the same questions and heartache as the character Hannah in the movie.

And rest assured, just as the character Hannah, eventually met her birth mother, so will moms and dads meet the children they disposed of. For some, that meeting will likely be in the context of an ugly courtroom trial in which the child will stand as a witness against her own parents, and moms and dads will receive their just condemnation. For others, those who have eventually humbled themselves to partake of the grace of God, the meeting will be under different circumstances where there will be forgiveness and healing and the wiping away of tears.

Let us not fail to always keep in mind eternity as we contemplate the consequences of sin and injustice in this world. It's easy to neglect the plight of unborn children because we think that the millions of children who perish every year, end their suffering upon the pangs of death. God will comfort them, but He can't make the pain of such tragedy just magically disappear in a moment.

Let's also keep eternity in mind by preaching the gospel alongside our fight for justice, to rescue unborn children from violence and moms and dads from the guilt of sin and consequence of eternal death.