Slice of Laodicea

A news story today both broke my heart and filled it with moral outrage simultaneously.  Americans, coming off years of hedonism and credit card spending orgies, are now increasingly aborting their babies who were unfortunate enough to be conceived during this economic recession.

These are not just single mothers with children conceived from one-night stands or some other sordid affair. We’re talking married couples here. Can’t. Can’t. Can’t. The cowardice and lack of character in America is nowhere more evident than in this story where women are showing up to have their children killed because they just can’t “afford” one more child. Gone is anything remotely related to the spirit of America past where difficulties were not solved by taking the coward’s or murderer’s way out, but by fulfilling one’s duty and taking responsibility for loved ones, no matter how hard the challenge.

Unlike the times of the past, we are living in a country that by law has to provide medical care in hospitals. Nobody has to deliver a child in a seedy tenement house as in the early 20th century. Nobody is delivering a child on the prairie with only a midwife present–if they were lucky. We’re living in America that, recession or not, still has a safety net. Medical care is available, food pantries are still in existence, we still have the Salvation Army, the Red Cross, and countless other charity efforts across the nation. The notion that killing your child is the solution to tough economic times is a thoroughly American method of dealing with hardship.

When you look at what we call hardship, however, it should make us blush when we consider what our grandmothers and forefathers lived through. What a shameful people we have become in this country when millions of our own children are murdered because people don’t want the worry or the hassle of a baby. They prefer to have the murder of an unborn child on their consciences rather than face the future with courage and faith in God.

Praise God that not all mothers have done this when faced with poverty. In this post I would like to remember just one baby who was born the 20th child of an impoverished Jewish cantor in Hungary. He had very little in his childhood but the gift of life. It was enough. In exchange for his gift of life, he gave the human race one of the most beautiful violin concertos ever written. His name was Karl Goldmark. Listen to this hauntingly beautiful, hymn-like second movement of the concerto he wrote and think of all of the beautiful music that has been silenced because the artists were murdered in their mothers’ wombs. The violin’s solitary voice rises up out of the orchestra like the lone voice of the rejected child.

Music is just one gift. Imagine what the world has lost just from America’s 50 million dead. Karl Goldmark is just one of the people who left the world beautiful gifts granted by God because his parents, even in their poverty, allowed him to live.