Unwanted babies?

An advertisement for Planned Parenthood in Minnesota claims that babies are noisy, smelly, and burdensome unless you want them. Planned Parenthood exists to make sure that every baby is planned and wanted. I teach teenagers and there are days when the same could be said of them. They are noisy, smelly and burdensome unless you want them. There are days when I definitely don't want them. Please, Planned Parenthood, can I kill them too?

Have we really fallen so far as a culture, or is this just a loud voice from a decrepit minority? Have we forgotten what family is all about? Are children and family really about the pleasures outweighing the burdens? Since when have children and family been about me?

Planned Parenthood has forgotten, and perhaps wants us to forget, that children are noisy, smelly, and burdensome whether you want them or not. That’s not the point at all. The point is that they are human persons. Precious human persons are worthy of our self-sacrifice to love. As a father, I put up with the noisiness, smelliness, and burdensomeness of my daughter, not because the pleasures outweigh the burdens, but because she is worthy of love and care. She is worthy of love and care simply because she is a human person.

What about the desire for every child to be a wanted child? This is a beautiful sentiment, if it meant that our hearts would expand in love to accept and care for every child. However, when it means that we demand the right to kill any child that isn’t “wanted,” this statement becomes ugly and evil. What does it mean for a child to be wanted? Planned Parenthood’s main concern is ostensibly that no child be born outside of a loving family environment. Again, this sentiment has the potential to be beautiful, if it meant that we would set aside our desire for sexual pleasure until it could be enjoyed in the context of marriage for the creation of family. Unfortunately, self-sacrifice does not seem to be in Planned Parenthood’s plan. When we as a culture decide to put the enjoyment of sexual pleasure above human dignity and human life, we become shallow, ugly, and selfish. The sentiment that no child should be born outside of a loving family environment paired with the sentiment that sexual pleasure should be pursued on a hedonistic, narcissistic level creates a dark, evil sentiment indeed. Let the children die that I may have my orgasm.

I pray that the billboard posted by Planned Parenthood is a minority voice. I would like to think that people passing by this billboard were as disgusted by it as I was just hearing about it. However, I fear that we may have been lulled into acceptance of such nonsense. We have been inundated with propaganda about “reproductive rights” and “sexual freedom.” Now that we are struck with the idea that a child is useless unless it is “wanted,” do we even bat an eye? We are being drawn along slowly, imperceptibly toward a public acceptance of narcissism, hedonism, and death. Do we really want to go there?

In the love of Christ,

Jeff