Whose Choice Anyway

'Yet there is something special about the life of the unborn child. It is human life, yes. But human life at its weakest, its most defenceless. And it is human life in which God has taken a most special interest. For it was in such a manner that he chose to take human life to himself. He did not first become Jesus the carpenter and preacher, or Jesus the boy. He did not even first take on the swaddling clothes of Jesus the babe in the manger. He dressed himself in the precarious beginnings in which all our human life is found: the egg, miraculously wrought upon by the Spirit of God; the embryo, the foetus. God took human nature to himself in its most feeble and dependent form of personal existence which might be taken by God himself. The Lord Jesus Christ in whose name we pray - glorious in heaven but still 'flesh of our flesh and bone of our bone' - was once a human foetus. That is what incarnation means.

'Not only so, but in the divine plan of redemption the first witness of the incarnation was no apostle or wise man, nor even a shepherd, but another of the same; a child unborn. Filled with joy and the Holy Spirit at the presence of the newly conceived Lord, the foetal John leaps in the womb of Elizabeth. Could there be any stronger demonstration of the unequivocal commitment of God to his unborn children than that?

'Because they are God's unborn children, and those whom we have rejected, he has not. St Augustine asks, of those who die before they are born, 'If they have shared with us in death, shall they also not share with us in the resurrection of the dead?'

And though we grieve for them as flowers born to blush unseen, their sweetness is not wasted in the desert of the abortion mills. For in God's mysterious and sovereign purpose, and on another shore, they bloom in glory.

'I ask, can we doubt that our unborn dead wait even now in the presence of the Lord Jesus Christ and the angels of God? "Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings, Thou hast brought forth perfect praise", wrote the Psalmist. Can we doubt that theirs is the sweetest of all, babes who were never sucklings, orphaned of their mothers before they brought them forth? - who stand in the presence of God, glorious and glorified as the Saviour who called them to be his own? "Suffer little children to come to me," he said; and though cast off by their earthly parents, they are God's children still.

'And their blood cries out for vengeance before the throne of God. 'But there is another sound, the sound of their prayer; for their mothers and their fathers, for doctors and nurses, for politicians and citizens - for all who have conspired against them, to cut off their lives in this world. Their prayer ascends and with it let ours. "Father forgive them, for they know not what they do."'