The Bigger Picture

As the recent news and life story of Apple CEO Steve Jobs has been broadcast on the event of his death, it has been made well-known that he was the result of an unplanned pregnancy and a beautiful adoption story. We can see the impact that the loss of an individual could have on our society. On the pro-life side, we focus on the individual lives that are lost on a daily basis through abortion, but have we contemplated the bigger picture?

Back in June of 1926, my great-grandmother and great-grandfather got married. I don’t know the exact date of their wedding, but I do know that my grandfather, their first-born son, was born on February 10, 1927. It has been a rumor in our family that, perhaps, my great-grandmother was ‘with child’ when she married. She denied the idea and took the truth to her grave. Given that I don’t know the exact date of her wedding, I did a little research. Based on a June 1^st wedding and a honeymoon baby, my grandfather would have been due February 22 - he would have been 2 weeks early. Not unheard of, but put the wedding any later in the month of June and he gets more and more premature; something that, in 1927, was probably not an event a baby usually survived. There are no records that he was a premature baby either. My point to this is that, more likely than not, my great-grandmother conceived out-of-wedlock. In this day and age, she would have had the ’right’ to abort and may have. If the conditions were as they are now back in 1926 and she had aborted, it wouldn’t have been my grandfather that would have been the only casualty. My grandfather married my grandmother on 1949 and had 3 children together. Four grandchildren followed and then seven great-grandchildren (and counting…). So, let’s do a little math: 1 (my gf), + 3 (my dad and 2 aunts), + 4 (grandchildren, including me) + 7 great-grandchildren. This is a total of 15 people who would never have existed. Sounds like a small number, but these are people who are dear to me. They are my family.

So, what is the big picture in abortion? We have not just eliminated 54.5 million children since Roe vs. Wade. We have eliminated entire families. Let’s do another math problem. We’ll use the statistic that there is a 50/50 chance of having a boy or girl in every pregnancy and assume that there were 27,250,000 girls and the same number of boys and they would have married each other to make it easier to calculate. So now we have 27,250,000 couples. The average number of children for a couple is 2.2 children. To account for more or less children per couple, we’ll assume 2 children per couple. That is 54.5 million children. Add that to the number of their parents, who were aborted and that is 109 million people that have never existed. That is just parents and children. It does not take into account successive generations. That is astounding! Out total population in the US is 312,299,000. That 30% of our population, gone.

Some of you reading this may be thinking that it’s a good thing that none of those people existed because we couldn’t sustain all those people. First of all, population control is NO reason to kill any human being. Second, we are not hurting that much in our country. I go grocery shopping every week and there is plenty on the shelves. I also live in a place with lots of open space. We have room. Third, as a Christian I believe God told us to ‘be fruitful and multiply.’ He didn’t say to ‘multiply until you don’t think the population is sustainable and then start killing off the babies and old people.’ He told Abraham his descendents would be like grains of sand or the stars in the sky. Grab a handful of sand the next time you go to the beach and start counting. Or look up at the sky on a clear, cloudless night with no moon and start counting the stars. Impossible, right?

Abortion doesn’t just allow a woman to ‘control her destiny’ by removing  an impediment to that future. It takes a life and all the lives that would have come from that person. Each baby girl and baby boy has all the ‘equipment’ to produce new life before they are born. That genetic code will never be reproduced and the individuals who would have come from that person will never exist. Who are we eliminating? A person with the cure for cancer? A gifted artist? Look at Steve Jobs and imagine what the world would be without him. No, he didn’t create a product that fundamentally changed lives, but he was gifted and added something to the world it would not have had without him. That is something to think about.