"It was just a mistake"

Mom throws infant at father

A northwestern Pennsylvania woman accused of using her baby to batter her child's father said she didn't realize what she was doing until it was too late. Chyrotia Graham, 27, of Erie, told police she had been drinking when an argument with the child's father turned violent early Sunday morning, according to an affidavit filed to support Graham's arrest. Graham said she "snapped" and began grabbing things and throwing them at Deangelo Troop, 20, not realizing she had picked up her 4-week-old son, Jarron Troop, telling police she held the child by his legs and swung him at his father. "People are trying to make a big deal about it, but she did not do it on purpose. ... It was just a mistake," he (the father) said.

This story is not a joke, it really happened. A mother used her 4 week old son to assault her mate. Let’s think about this a moment. There is something terribly wrong in our culture. I’ve said so many times on this blog that we, as Americans (indeed as humans) have lost touch with the value of human life. That makes for a solid argument against legalized abortion. In the past, I’ve felt that abortion was wrong but didn’t want to go far enough to say that the government should make it illegal…but the news over the past several years have made me rethink that.

When a society begins to lose its morality, then laws have to be inacted to keep the peace. The fewer morals we have, the more laws have to be passed. Abortion has fallen into that category. Before, we could rationalize its legality by saying that we must protect the woman’s health, or we must have a way for victims of rape or incest to keep from bearing their attacker’s child. That’s a good argument and would hold if we maintained our moral fiber. Unfortunately, that’s not the case. Now, abortion is being used as birth control and as a means of avoiding an "inconvenience". We’ve overstepped our bounds here.

So what does abortion have to do with this story? By using it as a tool to eliminate an inconvenience or an ‘oops’, we’ve cheapened human life immeasurably. And I think what started with fetuses is now beginning to spill into infancy. After all, if a fetus has no value then what real value does a 4-week-old have? It’s a disturbing trend, the evidence of which we’ve seen over the past two decades. Just last night, there was a story of a newborn found in a wooded area in Boston wrapped in a Hefty bag, placenta and umbilical cord still attacked, tossed away like yesterday’s trash. And many groups that advocate for abortion on demand are beginning to subscribe to the idea of infanticide as a means of "protecting the mother’s health". Soon, people will use things like post-partum depression and anxiety as a reason to do away with newborns. Some may scoff at this, but there is a real possibility here.

So I support overturning Roe v Wade, mainly because we as a society have demonstrated that we can’t handle legalized abortion as it was meant to be. Like a teenager who gets his curfew extended to midnight, we decided to come home at 4 AM. Legalized abortion is beyond our scope of responsibility and if it remains, I feel it will threaten much more than the human fetus. How long until we base the right to exist for the young and the old on how much they contribute to society or how little they inconvenience society? This is not a medical issue, it’s a moral issue. Medically, abortion should be safe, legal and rare; but that’s NOT how we utilize. Morally, abortion should not be an option for a society that can’t see the value of human life, a society that says "it was just a mistake" when a mother hurls her infant at someone in anger.