Right to Life speech contest winner

Shown, left, front are JoyEllen Wilson, sophomore; Hope McBride, freshman; Hannah McBride, junior. In back, from left, are Levi Jefferies, sophomore and Phillip Wilson, junior. All are homeschooled.

LUDINGTON — Mason County Right to Life recently held a speech contest at the Ludington branch of the Mason County District Library. Five area high school students participated with about 50 people in attendance. Hannah McBride, a junior, won the $100 first prize and will represent Mason County Right to Life at the state level on May 17.

     The camera pans, the scene is grim but we wait, still hoping…until that moment when we see, upon the discarded heap her torn and stained coat, her mangled and lifeless body. 

     Why in a movie depicting so much evil, atrocities that defy imagination; why do many of us recall that scene in the ghetto? Why do we have such a visceral reaction to the little girl in red?  We weep for her and for all those she represents.

     The movie Schindler’s List is a graphic depiction of a massive scale, legal, government supported, unjust destruction of innocent life.  Those who were robbed of their most fundamental right, their right to life, were so abused with the blessing of the German court. It was legal! The innocent incinerated in government sanctioned infernos. As handed down by their 1936 Supreme Court Decision – “The German Court refuses to recognize Jews… as persons in the legal sense”.

Just because something is legal… does that make right?

Virginia Supreme Court Decision, 1858 – “In the eyes of the law… the slave is not a person.” 

George Canfield, American Law Review, 1881 – “An Indian is not a person within the meaning of the Constitution.”

1909 British voting case – “The word ‘person’ did not in these circumstances include women.”

Official designation for citizens purged by the Soviet government – “Unpersons who have never existed”

Justice Blackmun – Roe v. Wade 1973 – “The word ‘person’ as used by the 14th Amendment does not include the unborn”

     Join me today as we explore the undeniable parallel between 1940’s Germany and the United States today as we look at our modern day holocaust.

     What is our most fundamental right and how do we know this? I submit to you that our most fundamental right is the right to life.  In today’s culture, we convince ourselves that there is no right or wrong, that we are the ultimate authority. We feel so clever, so very modern and yet as Solomon said there is nothing new under the sun. We read words written twenty-nine hundred years ago in Psalm 14, “A fool says in his heart that there is no God.” Indeed, we have become fools, deceived unto death.

     Any outrage over the Holocaust or abortion needs to begin with why? Any defense of the unborn, any definition of the value of life, any discussion of legal or illegal, right or wrong must start at no other point than at the point of creation itself..when God breathed life into man, created in His own image. It is because of this truth, The Truth, that we all are made in His image that breathes inherent value into our existence.

     Dr. Fritz Baumgartner explained it well when he wrote, “There is no more pivotal moment in the subsequent growth and development of a human being than when the 23 chromosomes of the father join with the 23 chromosomes of the mother to form a unique individual, who had previously, simply had not existed.”

     Inherent value super-cedes our arguments, overrides our excuses, dismisses our corrupted legal maneuvering. The child isn’t wanted, her timing is wrong, his poverty will be inescapable, the disability too profound, my inconvenience to burdensome…we lie to ourselves and to each other…fooling ourselves.

     Fooling ourselves like those in Weimar Germany where the Buchenwald concentration camp was located. As the camp was constructed, they fooled themselves. As the trainloads of weeping prisoners rolled by, they fooled themselves. As the stench permeated, the chimneys smoked and the innocent burned, they fooled themselves. They fooled themselves right up to the point where the victorious Allies forced them to march through the crematorium, through the gas lined showers, past the emaciated bodies. 

How did they fool themselves? Did they think…it couldn’t be that bad…they are not really persons…they are not wanted…their presence in inconvenient…perhaps they thought, well, I don’t know what is going on behind those gates but I am sure it must be safe, legal and rare.

     We fool ourselves into thinking abortion is a cure for poverty; after-all, what good could come from  being raised by a single, illiterate mom, in inner city Detroit? A study into the early life of Dr. Ben Carson, world renown pediatric neurosurgeon would expose the truth that success comes in many forms and from many starting places.

     We fool ourselves into believing that ability infers value. We, with our corrected vision and artificial knees. We, who daily take blood pressure medicine, inject our insulin, brace our teeth, cast our bones and hear with aids.  In all our weakness and infirmity we claim to have the authority to define ability or the lack there of.

     You should meet Gianna Jessen in the book Gianna: Aborted and Lived to Tell About It.  Gianna survived a saline abortion, the result of which left her with cerebral palsy but alive; a survivor of what was meant to be her Auschwitz. She grew up in a loving adopted family, she loves to sing and she loves to live.

     Perhaps you should visit a Joni and Friends camp or accompany Joni Eareckson Tada on her next wheelchair delivery to some foreign country. You will see that a life, even one crippled by quadriplegia is of immeasurable value.

     I ask you, does Michigan native, Army Sargent Travis Mills have less value now, after he left all four of his limbs on the battlefield in Afghanistan, than he had on the day he deployed? Is he any less a husband, any less a dad…any less a valuable man?

     Olympic Gold medalist, cancer survivor, brain tumor survivor, husband and father Scott Hamilton looks at life from the right perspective when he says that, “the only disability is a bad attitude.”