37 years. 50 million lives lost
Those just seem like numbers until the realization of the impact dawns on you.
1973: Remembering where I was in my life then, is a staggering thought all on it’s own. How I thought. What seemed important, and what did not. Roe versus Wade was just a story in the news to me. I can’t wrap my mind around that even as I write this.
What does 50 million of anything look like? How can you comprehend a number that is almost abstract in it’s enormity until you have someway to compare the numbers. Georgia (9.7 million), Florida(18.3 million), Mississippi (2.9 million), Alabama(4.6 million), Tennessee (6.2 million), South Carolina(4.8 million), Arkansas (2.8 million), Alaska (686,000). That gives us something to work with.
And, if we still fall short of our goal to reach 50 million by a few hundred thousand, it won’t take long to reach that goal if we continue to add to that number at a rate of 4,000 per day.
So, there you go. The population of eight states (including our own) approximately give us our number. That is something we can grasp because we live in Tennessee. We have relatives in Alabama. We vacation in Florida. Now, we can see the number 50 million with skin on. Those become people in our minds, and not just a number on paper.
What would our reaction be if tomorrow the population in Georgia, Florida, Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee (except us), South Carolina, Arkansas and Alaska were all simultaneously decimated by biochemical warfare.
That would be a catastrophe of biblical proportions! How could we who were left in America recover from such a loss? Would chaos reign? Would we view the destruction on our television and computer screens in stunned disbelief at the magnitude of such a disaster? Would we weep and mourn the loss of not only those we knew, but even for those we never met. Our hearts would be touched by the injury and deaths of complete strangers. We, as a nation, would both feel, and share that loss.
Yet, we hardly blink at the volume of lives lost since 1973, not by an enemy from without, but as a result of a court case that changed the laws of this land we love.
“You made the mess. You clean it up.” “Leave that exactly like you found it!” Everybody remembers hearing that from their parents when they were growing up. That is how we learned about personal responsibility. Because I am older now, I can comprehend a greater responsibility: the weight of my responsibility as a representative of my generation. When you get older, you also begin to grasp the reality of a legacy you will leave behind- whether you want to or not. When you are younger, you think you will live forever. Not so, as years go by. If you are wise, you consider the reality that the choices you have made in your life, will not only be remembered by those that come after you, their lives will be directly impacted- either positively or negatively- by what you have done, and by the choices you have made. They will reap what you have sown.
What do I want the legacy of my generation to be? I am still forming the answer to that question in my own mind. But I can tell you what I don’t want it to be. I don’t want it to be said of us in future generations that we did not clean up the mess we collectively made. Our legacy must be that even though we made a terrible mistake that cost the lives of millions, that we also corrected that by leaving this issue the way we found it. Legalized abortion in the 1950’s when I was born was unthinkable. It should become unthinkable again.
Otherwise, the legacy of my generation will be- not only did we legalize the deaths of innocent children- we added insult to injury by not realizing our wrong choice and correcting it.
Copyright ©2010 glenda clark
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