I had actually decided to leave this one alone. But my Conscience and my Love for Man wills otherwise - and because it is a movement across the entire Western world that we are told is about "liberation", you get it anyway.
On Monday, Massachusetts' governor stood surrounded by applauding women and signed a law.
The law removes the state's limit at 24 weeks for abortion.
"What are they thinking, cutting into the abortion limit?", you might think.
But this is not about them moving it. They are removing it.
The old framework with four conditions for late-term abortion is gone, and what remains is a single sentence - that an abortion may be performed based on the physician's professional judgment. Massachusetts is thus one of about ten American states where there is no longer any statutory UPPER limit at all.
There was applause. And that is what something inside me keeps returning to. Not the law itself - laws can be debated, and they should be. But the applause. The joy. The celebration of the last fence being taken down, as if it were a victory for Man that there is now no point on the journey from conception to birth where the collective says -
"Here something Holy begins, and here we no longer go alone."
For that is what a limit is. It is not a punishment. It is an acknowledgment that there is something on the other side of it.
I believe that a Spark is placed in Man. That none of us is just a clump of cells that at some random point became someone - but that we all carry an Image we are Created in, from the beginning. That you are special. That you are here with a purpose and a deeper meaning, for yourself and for the greater whole. And that on top of that you are loved unconditionally for being you.
In my eyes, a society's way of speaking about its own beginning reveals what it believes, at its core, Man is.
A society that cannot set any limit in this question here has not just made a legal choice. It has answered a question it pretends not to have heard.
And then, before any of you put me in a box I do not stand in - I am not opposed to free abortion. I believe there is a reasonable limit up to and including around week 12. The woman who stands in that situation stands in one of the heaviest things a human can stand in, and she must be met with freedom and not with condemnation.
But after the first three months, I believe something else ought to step in. Not a ban, naturally - but an involvement. Counselors who are not there to talk anyone out of anything, but who can explain what the procedure does to hormones, biology and psyche - and to spiritual life, that word we have learned not to use. For some women, the choice follows them for the rest of their lives, and it surfaces again the day they perhaps understand it in a different light - and there they stand, alone with something no one prepared them for, because the entire public language was busy assuring them that there was nothing to understand.
There is.
Regardless of what you are told.
Everyone who has children knows this.
It is not care to take the limit away. It is also not care to take the conversation away. Care is taking both the woman and what she carries seriously at the same time - and a society that can only contain one half of that sentence has lost something it will have a hard time explaining to its children.
And understand what this means in practice - a child in week 39, fully viable, days from its birth, can now be terminated at one doctor's discretion - legally. The same child, two weeks later, it would be murder to touch. There is no moral difference between the two situations. There is only a legal line, drawn there where no one any longer needed to defend it.
You do not applaud a fence that disappears if you can remember why it was put up.
And I can. Remember it. Feel it. Because it is, no matter how one tries to talk it away, a Human being all the way from conception to birth.
And I think it is incomprehensibly sad that we keep buying into the idea that boundlessness and liberation from responsibility should lead somewhere worth living in.
❤️🔥🪽
