Humble Cicadas Teach us about Babies
By Kevin Roeten (05/17/07)
Most people don't even know what a cicada is. Because of their gestation habits, they only come out of the ground every seven years. And when you see them, they’re much bigger than you can imagine. But when you think about it, their life cycle can teach those who actually think abortion is a 'right'.
Mary Stone writes an interesting “Letter to the Editor” to the Chicago Tribune. It just happens that one of the recent chat shows on Chicago radio began discussing the coming of the cicadas in Chicago. For those uninformed readers, their emergence from the earth is due May 21, and large and loud insects will be present for about two weeks. After they copulate, they bury their eggs, and will be gone for about seven years. Or at least they will be out of site.
But as Stone reveals, the host dug up a shovelful of dirt in his back yard, and found several cicadas in that one helping of dirt. He went on to say to his co-host, “These things were alive. If you unrolled them, they wiggled their legs and moved.”
Stone goes on to say that the compelling thing about this conversation was that the host seemed to recognize that he had actually found “cicadas”.
Not “pre-cicadas”.
Not “pre-born cicadas”.
But “cicadas”.
It’s interesting to note that it seems only when we speak of human beings that we have trouble understanding that “pre-born” babies are, in fact, human beings. They are equipped with all necessary DNA, and a soul. But some have rationalized their abortive actions by naming the baby a fetus, a zygote, a growth, a blob of tissue, etc., etc… Anything but what it is—a human baby. It feels the pain of abortion, but it cannot cry out in pain.
Some actually put a higher priority on saving the ‘seals’, or de-beaching the ‘whales’, or saving the ‘elk’ trapped in a hole in the ice. All of this is good, but one has to wonder what our priorities are now. Only babies have souls, but it seems that many of their parents have forsaken theirs’. It is true that the majority of Americans are now pro-life, instead of pro-abortion. But when(not if) Roe vs. Wade gets overturned, there will be a few angry people because of it. What will they do when they realize they can actually be jailed for killing a baby?
The weird part about it is the rumor that Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and John Paul Stevens are waiting until the next presidential election to retire. Even though both would like to retire now because of heath reasons, they seem to want to hang around until 2008 to prevent Bush from having another appointment to the Supreme Court. How unfortunate it is to politicize someone’s life. We should probably not ask those two which they think would be more important to save---a whale, a seal, an elk, a human baby, or a cicada.
Kevin Roeten
http://kevinroeten.us/
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