Over the last few years I have really enjoyed gardening, and
this was going to be a big year. For weeks I had seeds from 10 different
vegetables growing in soil in our house, waiting for the threat of frost to
retreat with the winter. In the meantime I dug and tilled a 10x10 plot for the
new garden, and eventually I moved the plants outside, making rows of 6 of each
plant.
These plants were still very small and barely sticking up
from the ground when it happened. As I was working in another part of the yard
I heard my wife say, “Reagan, are you helping Daddy dig a garden?”
I turned around, and sure enough, our 3-year-old daughter
was “helping” by standing in the garden and dragging her rake across my future
harvest. By the time I got to where she was, she has raked the life right out
of the garden.
When I realized what had been done, I nonchalantly shrugged
my shoulders and said, “Oh well. It was just a potential garden.”
It wasn’t really zucchini. It was just a clump of cells.
A seed is a far cry from a beanstalk. They don’t even look
alike!
I’m sure you don’t believe any of that because what was
growing in my garden was a garden. The seeds were plants, just in their
smallest form. The sprouts were signs of life, not signs of future, potential
life. And when my daughter terminated the garden, she put a definite, permanent
stop to what I was expecting.
I’ve never met a gardener who didn’t value each seed he
plants or each shoot that emerges from the ground. He understands that the seed
is life. As foolish as it is to think otherwise, that is precisely the analogy
that abortion supporters use.
“Crushing an acorn is not the same thing as cutting down an
oak tree.”
Of course it isn’t; they require different actions with different
amounts of effort. But yet they accomplish the same end. Look outside your
window and gaze at a mighty tree. Then imagine you went back in time a hundred
years and crushed the accord that was planted. Now back in the present, that
tree is no longer outside your window.
Crushing the acorn was the same as cutting down the oak.
Both resulted in the loss of a tree.
Aborting a baby is not the same as murdering an adult
because they require different weapons, but they result in the same thing: the
loss of a human life.
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