Drumbeats and heartbeats

At a children’s book festival last spring, I met a young woman who had recently served on the staff of a well-known Democrat senator. When I asked why she had given up the highly charged Washington atmosphere for small-town university life, she happily indicated that she had signed up for motherhood. Great! The obvious question was, “When?” She told me, and then added, “We don’t know the baby’s gender yet.”

Then she said, “Fetus, that is.”

Expectant mothers never say they’re expecting a fetus—unless, perhaps, they’ve recently served on the staff of a progressive senator, with all the attendant background and worldview such a job implies. “Fetus” is a perfectly good medical term often twisted to indicate something less than human. A baby is someone wanted, or at least expected. A fetus is … not.

From the beginning, observers have noticed how abortion activists and organizations have introduced a whole new vernacular for speaking of—what should we call it? For now, let’s just say the object of an abortion. Recent videos from the Center for Medical Progress (CMP) serve up a host of these euphemisms as we overhear abortionists and technicians discussing product, material, specimens, calveria, and so on. Video No. 3, which is actually intended as the first in a series of short documentaries called the Human Capital project, shows the actual objects under discussion: tiny brain stems, recognizable arms, little hands. But it was the fourth video that hit me hardest.

You’ve probably seen it. After Savita Ginde, medical director of Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains, discusses procurement procedures with the supposed buyers, they go to the lab to examine the remains of a first-trimester “specimen” that Ginde casually identifies as a baby. The lab technician identifies a leg, and someone remarks, with a laugh, “It’s another boy!”

Just a few weeks ago, I hovered anxiously in a hospital delivery room where my daughter was screaming. There were some complications and the baby needed a little help, but suddenly, a bluish, squalling infant was lying on her belly. The parents had not opted to learn their baby’s sex ahead of time, so that’s what we were all anxious to know, and it seemed to take forever before the nurse said, with a laugh, “It’s a boy!”

One boy gets a name and a home. The other, a petri dish.

CMP founder David Daleiden says he and his group has more of these videos ready to roll out strategically, unless they are legally restrained from doing so. If allowed to proceed, the videos should become a relentless drumbeat over the American landscape, where this battle has gone on too long. But the drums have never really been still. All along you could hear them, if you listened: insistent and steady and rhythmically matched to the beat of the human heart.

Those tiny hearts begin beating only a couple of weeks after conception—before a woman even knows she’s pregnant. But God knows. He knows intimately, because He once occupied that dark warm space, as a barely recognizable embryo with a tiny, beating heart. He hears them all. He knows when they begin to pump, and most assuredly He knows when they stop. And I know He will not let us forget.