"For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother's womb. I praise you because I am fearfully
and wonderfully made . . . . My frame was not hidden from you
when I was made in the secret place" (Psalm 139:13-15).
No one will ever know the impact this one life could have had on the world.
The product of a high school liaison, the baby was conceived in secret and kept that way until there was no choice but to confess what the boyfriend-girlfriend couple had done. Many offered grace—God himself offers it. A Christian organization would have provided a home for the young mother-to-be where she could have delivered the child and then given her up for adoption. The agency’s director met with the family and shared that there is a long waiting list of people eager to adopt babies—even here in Japan where adoption of children outside one’s blood line generally has not been accepted.
Many prayed for the baby to be allowed to live, but in the end, the decision to eliminate was made. It is best for all concerned, the woman who would have been grandmother declared. Easier perhaps, but best? For whom? Certainly not for the baby.
And what of the teenager who would have given birth? Now she is heavy-hearted with guilt about both the illicit relationship that brought life and about her decision which ended it. I recall that Mother Teresa often spoke out against abortion. I cannot quote her directly, but she once said something like, “One sin isn’t corrected by a second one,” as she pleaded with young women to allow their babies to live.
Abortion. According to the Alan Guttmacher Institute, 46 million babies are aborted worldwide each year. This statistic becomes even more striking when it is broken down: 126,000 babies aborted daily, 87 each minute, almost 2 every 3 seconds.
In Japan, abortion is the number one method of birth control. Illustrative of this fact, there were 341,588 legally induced abortions in the country in 2001. This represented a 2.5% increase over the previous three years. From 1998-2001, both the abortion rate (the number of legal abortions per 1,000 women) and the abortion ratio (the number of legal abortions per 1,000 live births) increased by 8.3% and 5.4% respectively. Like the teenager I’ve been thinking so much about lately, women less than 20 years old contributed most to these increases. (According to one 1990 study, pregnancies among Japanese adolescents occur at a rate of about 22 per 1,000 girls. Most of these pregnancies end in abortion.)
Especially at this season of the year, we celebrate the birth of One whose life has made an eternal difference for the world. I cannot help but wonder what if Mary had chosen the easier way?
