I wasn’t ready to answer THE question. I was driving my seven year old daughter, Kristen, to school when a news story came on the radio. She asked, “What is abortion?”
I looked at her across the front seat of the car. Her feet didn’t touch the floor and her pony tails bobbed about as she twisted intently toward me. I wasn’t ready to answer this. But, I’d rather it came from me than someone at school.
I took a deep breath and started in, “Well…. it’s when a mommy who is pregnant decides not to have her baby. She goes to a doctor and….does something… to…… make the baby not be born.”
My daughter looked at me with piercing eyes. “What exactly do they do to make the baby not be born?”
Well, this was getting deep fast. I believed in being honest so I explained about saline solution and scalpels.
“So they kill their own baby?” My daughter looked shocked.
“Well, some people ……don’t think that a baby is a human before they are delivered.”
She twirled one pigtail around her finger. “So, how can a baby suck its thumb and not be a human?”
I remembered that the week before she had received a “postcard” from her new baby sister due to arrive in four months. Of course it was a sonogram picture of Katie who now kicked sharply in my abdomen. The doctor had typed across the bottom of the picture, “Hi, Kristen! I can’t wait to meet you! Love, Katie”
I looked at her across the front seat of the car. Her feet didn’t touch the floor and her pony tails bobbed about as she twisted intently toward me. I wasn’t ready to answer this. But, I’d rather it came from me than someone at school.
I took a deep breath and started in, “Well…. it’s when a mommy who is pregnant decides not to have her baby. She goes to a doctor and….does something… to…… make the baby not be born.”
My daughter looked at me with piercing eyes. “What exactly do they do to make the baby not be born?”
Well, this was getting deep fast. I believed in being honest so I explained about saline solution and scalpels.
“So they kill their own baby?” My daughter looked shocked.
“Well, some people ……don’t think that a baby is a human before they are delivered.”
She twirled one pigtail around her finger. “So, how can a baby suck its thumb and not be a human?”
I remembered that the week before she had received a “postcard” from her new baby sister due to arrive in four months. Of course it was a sonogram picture of Katie who now kicked sharply in my abdomen. The doctor had typed across the bottom of the picture, “Hi, Kristen! I can’t wait to meet you! Love, Katie”
Katie was sucking her thumb in the “postcard”.
From the mouth of babes. My seven year old daughter might only be in the second grade but I would say she understood things more clearly than many adults.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O2l1-kvKomg
No comments:
Post a Comment