What is more important than family?

I deleted a family member on Facebook this morning from any more ‘friending’ communications.  She favors abortion.  I do not.

There are few things more important in life than family, but defending the unborn is one of them.  The unborn are not things; neither do they have a voice.

The unborn too are family, members of the human family, who through no fault of their own but for a woman’s right to choose - not a mother’s for those who abort their babies hardly deserve this dearest term of endearment – we will never know their names, there will be no shoes to be tied, no words to be heard haltingly pronounced as they learn to read, no joy, no sorrow, no anything at all.

Except one. 

I’m reading “On Celtic Tides”, by Chris Duff, subtitled “One man’s journey around Ireland by sea kayak.”  During lunch break today, in between “serving people who love to fish” – our motto here at Bill’s Boathouse - I happened to read the following that relates to the discussion that has now mutually ended with my relative. 

To catch the poignancy, here’s an excerpted picture, word for halting word:

On Achillbeg Island off the coast of Ireland, there is “a sod-covered ring that enclosed much of the level ground atop the cliffs.  The wall was four or five feet thick, and so settled into the earth that in places it was barely distinguishable.  In other places it was three or four feet high, curving around in a circle that abruptly ended where a portion of the cliff had fallen into the sea.  The setting sun picked out the ring in soft shadows and painted the land in rich colors of the Atlantic evening.  Within the circle were depressions and mounds whose shadows hinted at other dwellings.  The cry of a gull, the return flight of a cormorant winging in from the sea and the boom of swells meeting cliff floated over the ancient site.  I stood in the center of the ring and slowly turned, letting the green circle of history soak into my bones.

“The unbaptized Catholic babies were buried here.

“As real as my wonder at the earth works was, so too was the bone-sorrow and pity for the mothers and fathers who were not allowed to bury their unbaptized child in earth that the church had deemed consecrated.  What ground could be more consecrated than that which held the spirits of three thousand years of humanity, ground that knew the pain, suffering, and small triumphs of other human beings?  If there was any act of holiness in a child being buried on a cliff-top amid mounds and rock that were considered unholy, then it was the sacredness of that child being left in the care of a God who could see beyond the limitations of a threatened religion.  The unbaptized children would not have had names.  Any one of a number of stones that lay in the middle of the ring could have marked the graves of those infants.”

And so I similarly ask, what womb can be more consecrated that that which holds life, only to be snatched away as if it were unholy, unsacred and to be thus unknown and tossed unceremoniously away somewhere that only God knows?

God knows.