Did We Vote For Abortion?

At least it lived, the poet's blushing flower
That bloomed in a dark cavern of the sea;
No hired surgeon stole its one living hour,
Like today's unborn of an unwed she!
Did we vote to let teen girls void their wombs,
Or did nine old men pass it five to four?
Fifty million gone, not even with tombs;
Do those old men care enough to keep score?
Has pre-teen sex replaced tag and hop-scotch?
Whatever happened to parents' restraint?
Do sixth grade pimples the joy in sex botch,
Or mouthfuls of braces kissing constrain?
When kids get pregnant, TV shares the blame,
For teaching them how adults play the game!

During this very day a bitter, one-sided political battle is raging in the not-so-hallowed halls of Congress over a national health-care reform bill that will add a whopping one-fifth of spending to an already colossal debt-increasing budget. The Democrats with a super-majority and President Obama are determined to pass a bill, and they can; the only real question is, Will Senator Olympia Snow, a Republican, be the only one of her party to vote in favor. The 1500 pages are not even printed or revealed yet, but the Democrats have loaded it with enhancements to legal abortion, such as using tax dollars to pay for the service and requiring medical providers to perform abortions whether their consciences permit or not. The current rate of abortions in the nation is 4000 per day; some estimates double that for the new law.

Gray's "Elegy Written In A Country Churchyard" contains a famous line mourning the deaths of great talents who live and die in out-of-the-way places: "Full many a flower is born to blush unseen in caverns of the sea". Consider the effect of the approximately 50 million lives of unborn babies taken away forever before emerging from the wombs in birth; how many Shakespeares, Michelangelos, and Amadeus Mozarts were in that mournful total?

It was wonderful to live in America in 1946. I was a young preacher just starting out; there was a national confidence that engulfed America; we had just rid the world of Hitler, Tojo, and Mussolini; airplanes were beginning to be equipped with jet engines; and there was a rumor sweeping the towns and hamlets that broadcast radios would soon have moving pictures to go with the spoken words. TELEVISION! That magic word was on every lip. We preachers had never seen one, but we stood before churches full of returning veterans and warned them not to have one in the home; that television would distort the values of children and poison America. I sat on a plank laid across sawhorses with other goggle-eyed first-timers in a country store and watched my first TV picture in January 1951. I recognized the voice of Milton Berle, but his figure was a dark shape among the blurring snowstorm that was the screen. It was like looking at a Philco radio dial and seeing movies.

Just 22 years later, the TV poison had permeated the homes of America; the average watching time per person per day was over 3 hours; and a revolution among the young rebelling against the Viet Nam War and the values to which we had clung as a nation changed it forever. The Puritan ethic, that had begun in New England with the Pilgrims; permeated the 56 founding fathers in 1776 and through the first 175 years of our history' was scrapped; TV had done what the preachers of post WW2 said it would; sex became free of restraint; and the right of women to choose legal abortion was established by the Supreme Court by a vote of 5 to 4 in a convoluted case in 1973, Roe v. Wade. The nation which fought in World War II is no more as it was. It has become wicked in God's sight