Roe v. My Mother: A Personal Story
Published in Marietta (GA) Daily Journal, 5/14/22
“Imagine being upset
that babies will live.” So read a Facebook post that I ran across recently just
after arriving home from my five-year-old grandson’s baseball game. At the ball
park my wife and I had sat beside the young wife of one of our grandson’s
coaches. With a two-year-old at her knee and a five-week-old in her arms, the
young wife and mother had her hands full.
Well
into the game the two-year-old fell over and underneath the bleachers. Quickly
my wife reached to take the five-week-old. Although the infant cried at first,
my wife soon worked her magic. Within minutes the beautiful, fresh-looking
pajama-clad baby was asleep.
All
I could think of as I kept staring at the baby was the ongoing, so recently
intensified abortion debate. The five-week-old’s
face kept bombarding my mind with the question: How. Can. Any. Woman. Support.
Abortion? If any pro-abort woman could have looked into the face of this precious baby, would it
perhaps have melted her and made her think about what she’s actually advocating?
My
mother married at age 15. Her first child was born when she was 17. From age 17
to 47 she was having a baby approximately
every two years, seventeen in all. How shameful! No woman should have that many
babies. Thirty solid years (1917-1947) of childbearing plus 17 additional years
of rearing her last child? Were there no health services in Scott County,
Mississippi to explain to my mother and father their lack of knowledge or
wisdom? Were they even minimally educated? Sounds like a typical situation of
white trash, doesn’t it.
No,
it was an atypical situation of joy and beauty. It was laughter galore. It was
tenant farmer hard work and training in responsibility. It was parents who so
loved their children that we dared not do anything that would disappoint them.
It was faith in God and learning to put others before oneself. It was learning
early in life that language is the vehicle on which our thoughts ride and that
if our language is ugly, our thought world must be ugly. It was do your best,
not only in school but also in the fields. It was the glorious acquaintance with
soil, the woods, and cows. It was meals together three times a day that fed our
minds and spirits, not just our bodies.
If
my mother’s thirty years of childbearing had led into the ‘60s instead of
ending in the late ‘40s, Planned Parenthood would have encouraged her to murder
some of us. Yes, murder. Does abortion not intentionally end a life? To crush an unborn baby or to suction it out
of its mother’s womb is barbaric. I wish former Governor Northam of Virginia (a
pediatric physician, for heaven’s sake) could have sat beside my wife and stared
at the precious five-week-old she was rocking back and forth in the bleachers.
You think he might have repented of saying what he said about keeping an
already born baby comfortable while the mother and doctor discuss what to do
with it? God help us! Did the doctor not know that “fetus” is a Latin word for
offspring and does not refer to tissue?
Abortion
defenders have moved from “safe, legal, and rare” to “abortion on demand.” The
Democrat Party is not alone in pushing this morally abhorrent position. The
World Health Organization, in its “Abortion Care Guideline” calls for abortion
through the ninth month. The WHO calls for free abortions paid for by taxpayers
in all nations as well as for allowing non-doctors to perform them.
Weasel
words abound in the pro-abortion crowd’s lexicon. A fetus isn’t life, they say.
It is “potential life,” a term that a 10th grade biology student
could successfully refute. But abortion promotes “equality for women.” No, most
women who seek abortions are not well-situated women exercising their own
“choice.” Most are desperate single women who need the help that pro-life groups
try desperately to provide, those like Norma McCorvey, the real “Jane Roe” who
ignited our 55-year-old abortion debate.
Recently
in Mississippi we buried my mother’s 6th child and 3rd
daughter. She would have turned 96 in July. She was the mother of four
beautiful children and numerous grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Her life was as vibrant, joyous, and rewarding
as our mother’s. She joins six other siblings in death. How do you suppose we
remaining ten children feel about abortion?
“Settled
law,” like “settled science,” is a squishy, arguable term. I’m glad that Dred
Scott and Plessy v. Ferguson were finally un-settled. As the purloined brief of
Justice Alito insists, Roe v. Wade needs to be un-settled as well.
I’m a proud Georgian now, but proud also that
my home state of Mississippi got the ball rolling for overturning Roe. If the Supreme
Court overturns Roe and Republicans take Congress, let’s see if Republicans
will finally walk their talk and cut off Congress’s generous funding to the
abortion lovers at Planned Parenthood.
For
the political left, abortion, an act of violence, has become orthodoxy. I’m
grateful to God that my ten sisters, six brothers, and I were conceived and
birthed before such incredible religious fervor for an act of violence emerged.
If I may say so, such evil fervor, had it been applied to my siblings, would
have shorted the world of one good farmer, two career soldiers, one pastor, one
mail carrier, one insurance agent, one teacher/legislator, three executive
secretaries, two registered nurses, and five incredible domestic engineers,
none of whom were defined by their line of work but by their love of God and of
life and by the fact that they were “all those Hines kids.”
Roger Hines
May 9, 2022
Thank you for being such a prolific voice of clarity and reason!
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