Saturday, July 21, 2007

Oh, mama...

This morning I came upstairs, went into my bedroom and there sat Gabriel with a very mournful look on his face and his hand on my sidewalk counseling notebook. The notebook had been buried under a stack of things, but in rifling through things yesterday, had been left on the floor. I was concerned.


"Oh, mommy, de poor babies," Gabriel said patting the notebook. "Gabriel, you weren't supposed to look at that," I said taking Gabriel by the hand and picking up the notebook.


"Somebody hurt de babies wif a knife. Don't wook at it." I pulled Gabriel onto my lap, and opened the notebook wondering what he saw. There was a photo of a perfectly formed baby with a peaceful look his face, hands and feet perfect, but the middle of his trunk was charred black. Clearly this baby died a horrible death by saline injection which burns the baby to death, basically. Gabriel acknowledged the baby immediately tapping the photo with his finger." Yes, dis baby," he said. In Atlanta, the late term abortions (19 weeks gestation and later- up to 26 weeks, but also even later than that) are done by injecting digoxin into the baby's heart which causes cardiac arrest and almost immediate death. Those babies are delivered perfectly formed, so some of the photos in the manual were of those babies curled up, and they looked like they were asleep.


Gabriel looked up at my face, his eyes full of pain, and said," Oh, mama, dose poor widdle babies. Somebody hurt those babies wif a knife."


If only everyone felt as woeful for the "poor widdle babies."