FINDING WORDS FOR THE EMPTY SPACES
by Rick Lewers when an Anglican Minister in the ACT. (Rick is now Bishop of the Diocese of Armidale, Australia)
It’s 10:15am and the phone rings. A voice speaks filled with pain. A hope has been destroyed, plans have screeched to a halt and the newly-painted bedroom will never be seen by the eyes of the one for whom it was painted.
The voice stammers and cracks, a long silence, and sobbing is heard.
‘Could you bury our baby?’
It’s another day in the life of the church minister. Like a surgeon life can so quickly transplant another’s grief into your own life. From the day of conception for this couple they rejoiced in the child forming in the womb. This would be their child. But this child didn’t make it into the world. So was it a child at all?
Should I comfort them with the views of this age: ‘Well, it really wasn’t a viable human being anyway…’?
What depths of depravity could one sink to in even suggesting such a thing? A child has been lost. Their child has been lost. But it could so easily have been me or you saying those empty words, ‘I lost my child’. No caring person would for a moment suggest that it was anything but my child. Yesterday’s anger, in light of this call, is now surpassed. In the same moment I grieve with this family I recall yesterday’s news. I am told, not asked, that money contributed by me by way of taxes has been granted to support the quiet termination of other children’s lives. That is of course if you call them children.
It’s strange how you can have two different views separated only by the distance between two hospitals. What in one room we see as grieving parents, we see in another room as the abortion of a ‘non-viable’ pregnancy. What we see in one room as a loss of enormous magnitude others declare as a relief, an escape. The sorrow I see in one room and the scars left behind by a stillbirth are contrasted with a government that grants money to support the stillbirths of many children.
Should I be angry that they use my money? How should I respond to the use of my money to support that which is immoral? What a confused world I live in. Months ago the Government banned circuses entering the Australian Capital Territory (ACT) because they were deemed to be cruel to the animals. A choice to spend my money on a ticket to the circus was taken from me. Now that same Government grants money, my money, to the destruction of human life. It’s a pity we are not all elephants; we might have more chance of surviving. Along with the circuses perhaps we should ban the Government from entering the ACT.
Could the Government please explain to this grieving family and to me why they are using our money to terminate children like the one this family lost? Taught to honour and respect leadership, to obey those in authority doesn’t give the people of Australia or the ACT permission to let those in authority betray the people they are supposed to serve.
A government not held to account is a dangerous government. Honour, respect and obedience are something won but in recent times those who govern seem to be running at a loss. They wonder why. Why don’t we Canberrans tell them?
See also, Killing Baby Girls: Belief and its Consequences and in Tasmania at this time, Abortion Law for Tasmania? and UPDATE: Tasmania’s Proposed Abortion Law Changes. Also, Abortion Tas: Hospital Chaplain’s perspective.
