Crazy Stable

This little boy is named Derby. He and his twin Loen were born at 24 weeks’ gestational age. Today, they are happy and reasonably healthy 5-year-olds whose story is recounted here.

Forty years ago, the Supreme Court of the United States of America made it legal in all 50 states to kill a child of this age, if he or she is still inside the womb.

About 1,000 children* this size are legally killed each year. Fifty Sandy Hooks a year. Not by guns, but by medical professionals. Since Roe v Wade, that equals 40,000 babies as indisputably alive and human as the one in this photograph, destroyed using techniques too disturbing to describe here.

Why focus on such a tiny percentage of the total number of abortions performed each year since Roe?

One reason is because later-term unborn babies are more immediately recognizable as ourselves, and we are more readily moved to defend that which we recognize.

Another reason is that I cannot wrap my mind around numbers like 54 million, a conservative estimate of the number of missing children since the "right to privacy" denied them their most fundamental human right: the right to live.

To talk about "social justice" but turn away from this truth...how?

Derby and Loen, born at 24 weeks' gestation, young enough to have been legally aborted in the U.S."We shall not weary, we shall not rest, until every young woman is given the help she needs to recognize the problem of pregnancy as the gift of life. We shall not weary, we shall not rest, as we stand guard at the entrance gates and the exit gates of life, and at every step along way of life, bearing witness in word and deed to the dignity of the human person—of every human person."--Richard John Neuhaus, 2008

*According to a 1997 survey by the Guttmacher Institute, more than 1,000 babies 24 weeks' gestational age or older are aborted each year in the U.S. According to the CDC, about 1% of all abortions in 2009 took place after 21 weeks' gestation, which would equal at least 7,000 a year. According to another Guttmacher survey, a fetal problem was present in only 2% of such abortions.