As a follow-up to my “Letters from Blob” article, please read the following letter from a very wise woman. She has a great first-hand perspective to share about her own blob, and the road she traveled to arrive at the truth she knows today.
If we allow scientific thinking as a given, since we live in an enlightened age, surely the mere fact of oxygen entering the bloodstream through the nasal passages rather than the umbilical cord cannot be the key to viable life. That sounds more like magical thinking, doesn’t it.? The magical whiff of oxygen, and poof! …the fetus is a real baby!When I was in college, back in the 60's, I didn't really know any babies. There was a sexual revolution going on, we had the "pill" and if that failed, abortion seemed like an equally available alternative. I wasn't "religious", and neither were my friends. We were "liberated" women. I thought I had it all figured out.
A few years later, I was married and pregnant, and I felt the movement of a "blob" inside of me. Before I even began to comprehend what was going to happen to me at 9 months, it happened at 7 months. That blob made his entrance into the world early, and his lungs were not ready. He was very small, and in intensive care, and I was stunned to find myself looking at that blob with a heartbeat, somehow shaped exactly like a human, just lying there with tubes and monitors.
The doctors told me he might not make it, and that they might have to do some surgery, which they said more than likely would fail. There is a lot more to this story, but my blob survived and when I looked into the level gaze of his big blue eyes I saw him looking back at me and I recognized him. He only weighed around 4 pounds, but he was that same person that I see today, more than 30 years later. Of course, I don’t think of him as a blob, and he is now definitely a strong, kind, loving son, with a wife and son of his own. I have believed in God more because of that blob.
I didn't see my blob as a human because of magical thinking. He was real, and if for some reason he had been killed before he breathed the sacred air of the outside world, he would not have been less real. I know that with no shadow of doubt. It makes no more sense to kill a child before he breathes the air of our atmosphere, than it would to kill an adult because we find him annoying, like a retroactive abortion. We wouldn’t do that, would we?
I can’t stand to think about what could have happened to the contents of my uterus if I had become pregnant before it was convenient or “right” for me. I could have easily permitted it to happen without even knowing who I had allowed to be killed because he had not yet breathed oxygen.
Very well put!
Copyright ©2007 - Phil Harris
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