What Child Is This?

If you haven’t seen it, I recommend you pick up the latest issue of Reader’s Digest (January 2005, “The Contender”), and read about Kyle Maynard. Kyle, 18 years old, is a championship wrestler; a football player; and, as one of his fans named him, a “human anti-depressant.” Kyle is remarkable because he was born without legs and arms. The reporter writes:

“When Anita Maynard was pregnant with her first child, the doctors told her and her husband, Scott, that they couldn’t find the baby’s legs on the ultrasound. Upon second inspection, however, they reassured the Maynards that the child was indeed possessed of lower limbs. Then Kyle was born. What the doctors had mistaken for legs turned out to be a pair of misshapen feet protruding just beneath the baby’s hips. He had no hands. His arms were only half there.”

Had they known from the ultrasound that Kyle’s limbs were not fully formed, would the doctors have recommended an abortion to his parents? Pro-abortionists like to talk about ridding ourselves of “defective fetuses,” as if a child is something one should send back to the manufacturer if it is not in what we consider good working order. But what is “good working order?” In my experience, and most of my readers, it would include having all four limbs. But Kyle has accomplished more in his eighteen years without them than I have in more than forty with all four. Who are we to judge this young man’s life experience? Would you deny him life now because he is not perfectly formed? Who are we that we think we can make decisions about his quality of life? Ask Kyle what he thinks about aborting the imperfect. Better yet, ask the man who called Kyle his “human antidepressant.” This man was depressed, overweight, and ill – discouraged about life – until he saw Kyle and the way he has overcome tremendous challenges. He changed his life because of the courage he saw in Kyle. Herein lies one of the biggest problems with abortion and euthanasia – regardless of what we see as another person’s quality of life, we can never measure that person’s impact on others. If we deny them life, we take away the possibility that they may positively affect the people around them and change the world for the better.

If you still aren’t convinced, you should meet Ashlynn (http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=3768524787). She’s eighteen months old now, and the pride and joy of her grandmother and mother. We may never have known her, though, were it not for Virtue Media. Her mother saw one of their commercials and decided against having an abortion. As a result, the world has been blessed with Ashlynn’s sweet smile, and the hope that each life brings to us. What might Ashlynn do with her gift of time outside the womb? Her future is wide open, thanks to her mother’s unselfishness.

Yes, abortion is the single most selfish act a woman can commit. Certainly I don’t like saying that. I never wanted to be a selfish person. But it is undeniably done only for the sake of the people who managed to survive the womb themselves, to relieve unwanted responsibilities, including the kinds of challenges that Kyle’s parents faced. But it is exactly these challenges and the unselfish love that parenthood brings out in people that make us better human beings. On the flip side of that, it is abortion that emphasizes our selfishness, our self-absorption, and our obsession with physical perfection and conformity. Is this the world in which we really want to live?

Read Kyle’s story, and visit Virtue Media’s website to view their ads at www.virtuemedia.org. Look long and hard at Ashlynn’s picture, and as you do, consider the 45 million children just like her, including my own, who did not survive the womb, and the children who will die today and tomorrow because their mothers and fathers are unwilling to make the sacrifices that come with parenthood. Please reach into your hearts and consider the ways in which you can help fill the world with beautiful children like these.