Our experience with losing a fetus may be very different from the experiences of many others seeking to end their pregnancies through abortion. We wanted our baby so badly. My husband and I had been trying for over a year to achieve the blissful state of pregnancy. Finally, a few days after the New Year in 2004, we saw that beautiful blue line and discovered that we were indeed parents-to-be.
Tragedy struck us to the core just a week later. That Sunday, I was experiencing low blood sugar and ravenous hunger, the result of pregnancy hormones already raging within my body. On Monday, I woke up with the strangest feeling. I did not feel pregnant anymore. I dismissed the feelings because I had never previously been pregnant and thought I must have gone through a quick growth spurt and was in a sort-of leveling-out stage, but lingering doubts stayed with me all day. The following morning, during his early morning shift at UPS, my husband experienced the same gut-wrenching feeling that our baby was gone; I did not want to hear it, though I already knew it deep within. On Tuesday night, at only 3 ½ weeks gestation, I began bleeding. Two days later, I actually lost the so-called “products of conception.”
If life begins much later than 3 ½ weeks gestation, as abortion proponents say, then how in the world did I know that my baby was gone? And why did my womb feel so empty prior to losing the actual fetus?
Most medical doctors would agree that the life of a person ultimately ends when his or her heart stops beating. The brain and other organs may have stopped functioning, but medically speaking, the person is still considered alive, even if he or she is deemed a “ vegetable .” Just watching enough ER episodes will attest to the infamous “time of death” line, that moment when life is considered final at the flat-lining of the heart.
By the same logic, wouldn't it be fair to say that life, at the very least, begins with the beating of a heart? This would mean that a fetus has life within at least 18-21 days after fertilization. It is after this time when the majority of induced abortions occur because most women have no way of knowing they are pregnant until the first day of their missed period, usually at 14 days. It takes another few days to process the news and to research options (if the pregnancy is unwanted); by then, the heart of the fetus is already beating.
My personal belief is that life actually begins days earlier at fertilization. As I began to process my grief over losing our baby, I read that my experience, though dramatic, is certainly not uncommon. Most web-sites and other pregnancy resources state that the first physical sign of impending miscarriage is bleeding but that many woman, even prior to that, experience similar feelings of not being pregnant anymore or that something is “just not right.” In my mind, this indicates that there is a mysterious duality in human life – an earthly body and an unseen spirit. The miscarriage experience of so many women seems to show that there is a spirit that God gives a baby at fertilization, and that when that spirit is no longer there, a mother can sense that clearly, even before the body has actually departed from her body. In my case, even my husband could perceive the loss. At funerals, everyone understands that what they are seeing is not the spirit of a person but the flesh; long before the flesh is buried within the earth, the spirit of that person has departed from the body.
Why is there such a fine line between miscarriage and abortion? Why can one woman grieve and feel so deeply the loss of a child even as early as 3 ½ weeks gestation, and another woman justify taking the life of a child at that stage or much, much later, with the knowledge that her child's heart is already at work and that her child's blood is already separated from hers (a complete individual with a unique genetic make-up)?
My husband and I recently watched a suspenseful science-fiction movie entitled The Forgotten . It is a strange yet beautiful glimpse into the profound connection between a mother and her child. Basically, during the course of the movie, the protagonist is being “persuaded” to forget the memory of her child who died in a plane accident. Towards the end, she is forced to bring back her first memory of seeing her newborn just after delivery and then, through supernatural means, all of her memories of her son from that point on are erased, and she is left comatose. As she reawakens, however, she has a sweet flashback to being pregnant, and although she can remember nothing beyond that, she remembers clearly and poignantly, “there was a life inside me.”
I tell that story because the movie moved me in a profound way, and I wept again for the child we lost. You see, abortionists would ask me to forget my lost baby because they do not see it as a child, but rather as a dehumanized set of cells and parts called an embryo; but, regardless of the fact that I will never have any memories of that baby growing up, I have a deep connection and an inextricable emotional bond to that unborn child. There is a Spirit within me that testifies to the fact that “there was [indeed] a life inside me.” I became a mother, and my husband a father, at the very moment egg and sperm united.
Does life begin at conception? I believe that it does.
Why? Because “there was life inside me,” and I knew the day, even within the hours, that it was no longer.
“For you created my inmost being ; you knit me together in my mother's womb. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made, I know that full well. My frame was not hidden from you when I was made in the secret place. When I was woven together in the depths of the earth, your eyes saw my unformed body. All the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be.” – Psalm 139:13-16 (emphasis mine)
* The author and her husband are expecting a new little one in February of 2005. They have a special love and place in their hearts for each of their babies that no one else can fill. They look forward to, with full assurance, meeting their first child one day in heaven and to meeting the millions of little ones who have gone before us who were not given a chance or choice to live.
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