A Wholeness of Vision

I have heard F. LaGard Smith, author of When Choice Becomes God and other good books, speak on a couple of occasions.  In one of them he spoke very movingly  about how we elevate cold-hearted choice above the gift of unplanned blessings- and he talked of his youngest sister, unplanned, a surprise, nonetheless loved and who grew up to the adoptive mother of other unplanned blessings.

He reminded me of two other people I know.  One was conceived on her parents' honeymoon in spite of at least two (and I believe it was three) different forms of birth control.  When the newlywed and now newly pregnant mother returned from her honeymoon and went to see her doctor a few weeks later, he gruffly demanded, "Didn't you follow any of the directions I gave you?"  She had- it just didn't take.     That baby barely survived her birth, as she was delivered normally in spite of a full placenta previa 9 months later, and some people might have considered it a mercy if she hadn't survived.  She could hardly have come at a more inopportune time in her parents' lives.  They were poorer than church-mice, not quite finished with college, in a marriage where it was already obvious one partner was not quite as he had advertised himself to be.  Though much loved by their mother, the other parent was the sort of parent about whom his adult children could have written the sort books that might have gotten them a gig on Oprah, if any of them had been so inclined..

The other child was accidentally conceived during one more reconciliation effort in a tumultuous relationship between two high school drop-outs who had gotten married when they were around 16 and 18.  That final reconciliation lasted approximately long enough for the conception.  The mother stuck around long enough for the child to be born and start crawling, and then she left, abruptly, on night, leaving a note on the door for her husband and a hastily drafted babysitter she barely knew with the abandoned kids.  She was pregnant again, and would end up placing that child for adoption.  The father would try, half-heartedly, resentfully, bitterly, and mostly in a drunken stupor, keeping the kids for about another six months and then he would foist them off on his own parents.  His own father, the grandfather of these hapless youngsters, would die of a heart attack just a few short years later when that reconciliation baby was just around six years old, leaving a grandmother to rear three grandchildren and their own teen-aged, late arrival, surprise third child, alone.

These two stories are poster children for the pro-choice movement, really- those are the sorts of stories we are told when people lobby for abortion not by talking about abortion itself, because, frankly, it's unsellable, but by appeals to emotion and misleading slogans about how 'every child should be a wanted child.'  Yes, and I have no doubts at all that the mother of the child in my second story would have aborted her son if that had been legal at the time. It's hard to even think those words with any sort of equanimity because I am the honeymoon baby in the first story, and my husband is the reconciliation baby in the second.

Believe me, although his mother may not have wanted him, he was very much a wanted child- his grandmother and great-grandmother adored him, his aunts doted on him, and his sisters loved him, and he did not deserve to be murdered in the womb because his mother didn't want to be burdened with the responsibility of another child.  And even if none of those people had been there, he still deserved to live, to be given a chance, and to grow up to be the wonderful father he is.  Had our mothers made other choices, our biological children would simply not exist, which suits the Malthusians just fine, but what would have become of our adopted children without us?  Where would Blynken and Nod be?   We were there at the right time and the right place largely because our young and not altogether prepared mothers did not murder us when we were merely 'unplanned pregnancies.' 

I thought of all this when I came across another story of an planned, and in a real sense, unwanted, but not unloved child  through a post at this blog.  The story stunned me a little.  A couple years ago I read the late Sheldon Vanauken's beautiful book called A Severe Mercy.  
  He writes of the beautiful love story between himself and his wife, Davy, and the love story between the two of them and the Lord as they left paganism and became Christians, and how he lost Davy so young in that incredible relationship.  What he did not tell them, but did write of in a later book, The Little Lost Marion and Other Mercies, was that his wife Davy had had a child out of wedlock at the age of 14 and placed that baby for adoption.  Mr. Vanauken says Davy never stopped loving that child, and after she died, he searched for her.  He finally found her in the eighties.  She was the mother of three children of her own.  Vanauken and Marion developed a friendship so deep that she called him 'father,' and this relationship gave him, Chuck Colson writes:

a greater insight into what he calls a "wholeness of vision" regarding abortion. In The Little Lost Marion, Vanauken writes: "Had the frightened young girl who was Davy lived in this decade instead of that remote one, she would perhaps have confided in a school counselor, who quite likely would have told her of the possibility of a quick and easy abortion…. What frightened fourteen-year-old would not clutch at the way out that the… counselor held out to her?"
But a wholeness of vision requires looking beyond the immediate concerns of a crisis pregnancy to the full and future implications of abortion. To achieve this, Vanauken writes, "I must see not only the frightened fourteen-year-old Davy… but also the warmly alive Marion and her family."
While he can feel sympathy for the frightened young girl, Vanauken says, now "I know Marion and her children, too." Had Davy undergone an abortion, Marion and her "three bright and beloved children, would never have existed at all."
This is especially poignant in light of the fact that Davy and Vanauken had no children of their own. If Davy had aborted Marion, there would now be no loving woman who calls Vanauken "father," nor her three children.
"I glimpse," Vanauken writes, "what [John] Donne meant in saying that any man’s death diminished him. I should be diminished if half a century ago Davy had clutched at the straw of abortion. And all the folk who have touched or shall touch the lives of Marion and her children and their children-to-be would be diminished."

America's holocaust of abortion, over fifty million babies since Roe v. Wade,  has diminished us all in ways we can never even fathom.   It is yet another example of the  immeasurable cost of the unintended consequences that come of choices made based in fear and the desperation of a temporary circumstance.

As a culture we need to deep our vision, to choose and nourish life.  Choose hope- and remember that whatever happens in your life- God sees the whole picture- ask Him for that grace of wholeness of vision in your own life as well.

This post linked at Sunday Favorites and Spiritual Sundays

Pin It

Pin It