Abortion

Dear Editor:

Last week Aisha Houghton described some of the suffering and horrors she sees and deals with as a social worker where children are abused, neglected, violated and damaged sometimes beyond repair it seems.

Bless her caring heart for working in the trenches of such chaos, hurt and confusion.

My understanding of her solution is that of practicality. If a child is never born into such circumstances, it won’t ever have to suffer.

I agree that children ought not to be brought into that kind of life, but to me, killing the child before it is born is the ultimate abuse, the ultimate horror. If killing the child is the solution to suffering, why not kill the 2 year old or 8 year old, or any age for that matter, when damage and hurt is being done.

That will certainly end the suffering.

I believe prospective parents should consider whether they want or even should have children, and to my mind, using birth control methods is a given. But way beyond that is the desperate need to promote a society where people respect and care for and encourage each other.

I imagine that’s what Aisha is trying to do in her work.

The missing element, though, is that the source of those things is the loving Father who gives us grace and unrelenting love and the guidelines by which to live that kind of life.

This is not “pie-in-thesky” stuff. It’s fundamental to the health of a society. Without it we seem to fall into a dog-eat-dog mentality, and children, being the most defenseless, fall prey to it.

Certainly a child born into abusive situations suffers a kind of death . . . of hope, joy, a life worth living, which sometimes ends in physical death anyway.

In the public arena, schools in particular, it may not be appropriate to overtly hold up Christian teachings as the model for behavior, but the civility and respect that is born out of those teachings can and must be taught and modeled.

Extending that modeling to all situations in our society is the best hope I can think of.

Inez Kollmar Stanwood