Forty-One Years. Dear God Forgive Us.

I can’t do this anymore.

That was the thought.

It came after the realization.

I woke up this morning feeling sick without an illness. I was sorta dizzy, totally dispirited and generally feeling like it was a day to avoid.

Then, I remembered. Today is January 22, a date, to paraphrase Franklin Roosevelt, that lives in infamy.

And I thought: I can’t do this anymore. I can’t, I can’t, I can’t deal with the fact of … how many is it? who keeps this grisly toll? … tens of millions of lives taken, tossed in a trash can, flushed down the drain, “disposed of” as waste.

Forty-one years. And each life is a snowflake; unique, irreplaceable and beautiful.

It isn’t tens of millions of lives lost. It is one life lost, and another life lost, and another and another and another until we are looking, not at an individual who is his or her own bright shining star, but at an incomprehensible mass of anonymous bodies piled into mountains of wasted human lives. Their individuality, their essential humanness, lies hidden in the crush of numbers.

Forty-one years of easy killing, and the heavy toll it’s taken, not so much on the babies we’ve murdered, but on us, as a nation, as people, as free moral agents who bear the weight of our decisions, is too much.

Abortion is a gateway drug of killing and social destruction that appears to know no limits in its power to deform, deface and destroy the essential humanness, not just of the unborn, but of whole societies that partake of it.

Abortion. Euthanasia. Embryonic stem cell research. Egg harvesting. Paid surrogacy. Designer babies.

The beat goes on.

Dear God forgive us.