I want to share with you my grave concern about the word ‘nuclear’. It appears in the poem Prayer for the Preborn Child (copy enclosed). Be sure to watch the video in which the words of this poem scroll across the screen (length 5 minutes) and it can be viewed at naapc.org (or you can get to it by typing National Association for the Advancement of Preborn Children into your browser).
Over the years it has been my honor to visit with you in the monthly newsletters of the NAAPC (National Association for the Advancement of Preborn Children – a little organization I founded in 1984). Bill Hogan, I think you commented that you have been receiving my letters for 40 years.
We sought to make a little bit of a difference for what Dr. Jerome Lejeune called the “good cause of children yet to be”. For a number of years I would travel to Paris every October and stay with the Lejeunes, and we would share our hopes and dreams for preborn children – our prayers as well; and our prayers together for Dr. Lejeune’s work in hope to find a cure for Down’s Syndrome, he having been the one to receive from President Kennedy our nation’s highest award for isolating the X21 chromosome responsible for Down’s Syndrome.
Following Dr. Lejeune’s death at sunrise on Easter morning 1994, I took my 12 year old daughter, Ruth, with me to Paris (a trip we already had planned to take him flowers at the hospital), but we arrived too late for the funeral Mass. Mrs. Lejeune told me as Ruth and I sat there with her in her living room that following his death, the family was meeting and trying to decide how they were going to accommodate all the people who were going to attend the funeral Mass at the small church in Paris to which they belonged when there came a knock at the door. It was the cardinal’s representative from Notre Dame Cathedral offering Notre Dame for the funeral Mass. She said it was usually reserved for the funerals of heads of state and the like, but “we said ‘yes’ because we needed more space” – and it is good they did. She said it was packed to overflowing.
One hundred and fifty priests were in attendance, 7 bishops – they came from all over Europe and other parts of the world. She said, “Chirac (the President of France) called me when Jerome died and he cried.” But Mrs. Lejeune was not impressed by any of that. She took it all in stride. What she remembered most from the funeral, she told Ruth and I, was a little Down’s boy who came up to the microphone at the pulpit and said, “Dr. Lejeune, he healed me.”
Pope John Paul II, in a rare move, issued a statement at the time of Dr. Lejeune’s death finding more than coincidence in the fact that he passed away at sunrise on Easter morning. This very humble man whom God gifted with such a brilliant intelligence was a gift to the world. It is my humble honor to have known him. Imagine my surprise while Ruth and I were with the Lejeunes that week following the funeral Mass when she took me to their closet and produced these stacks of letters about a foot high each, tied with string, which I recognized as past monthly newsletters of our NAAPC (Dr. Lejeune was on our mailing list) and Mrs. Lejeune said, “Jerome told me to save these. He said, ‘This is history.” I kidded her and said she had misunderstood him; that he was using an American expression “Make these history”, meaning to throw them away.
I suppose it is little instances like this that encourages me to keep finding the money for stamps out of my small country law practice to get these letters out to all of you over the years. I told my wife that my idea was to try to always fund it out of my law practice and not ask for donations and the money always seems to have been there somehow.
But now this month, based upon rapidly accelerating world events, not the least of which is the threat of nuclear war looming on the horizon, I feel that I must address the careless statements of Putin and other world leaders who are casually throwing around the word ‘nuclear’. A nuclear war is unwinnable and must never be. President Reagan and Brezhnev knew that and met together in fireside chats that Reagan arranged working together in earnest for nuclear disarmament – Reagan’s “trust but verify”. But now, much of their work has become unraveled. The cauldron in the Middle East is about to boil over. Iran is within a gnat’s eyelash of having a nuclear weapon. Israel and the United States have said Iran must never be allowed to possess a nuclear weapon. Russia, China, North Korea seem to have come together in what Reagan would have called an “axis of evil”, and the high office of the presidency is in a state of limbo in our own country.
There is a scene in the iconic 1946 movie “Gone with the Wind” in which Rhett Butler (played by Clark Gable) is seated on the springboard of a one horse wagon helping Scarlett (played by Vivian Leigh) safely get past a fleeing line of Confederate soldiers as General Sherman was completing his march to the sea and burning the city.
Rhett and Scarlett are down by the train depot which is going up in flames and the fire is about to spread to some wooden boxcars containing ammunition. The horse is neighing, afraid of the flames. Rhett hops down from the wagon and tells Scarlett to throw him her shawl which he ties over the horse’s eyes and then takes the horse’s bridle and leads the wagon forward. In the background we are seeing some bedraggled, defeated, exhausted Confederate soldiers barely moving along, one carrying a comrade on his back and Scarlett yells, “Shoo! Get out of the way!” And Rhett says, “Scarlett, don’t be so anxious to see them go because with them goes the last of law and order.” And sure enough, as the end of the column passes by the wagon, you hear the breakage of glass with things being thrown through the store windows and looters moving in to steal. Whoever wrote that scene was brilliant because it bespeaks the truth of a much larger picture in the world.
A number of years ago, it was announced that the last of the World War I veterans had died (as I recall, it was a man from one of the European countries). We just celebrated the 80th anniversary of the ending of World War II. Stop and think about it, a boy who lied about his age and signed up then for the service at age 15 would now be 95. Soon the last of the World War II veterans will pass from the scene and with them seemingly will go the law and order that the shed blood of their millions offered up on the altar of peace purchased for the world.
Recently, my wife and I saw a fictional movie that I wanted to see because it dealt with the international space station (ISS). The markup of the international space station and their weightlessness (they must have taken them in rides up in planes that can produce so many minutes of weightlessness) was all well done. I commented to my wife that I didn’t realize until I saw this movie that the ISS was so lengthy inside. It was one module after another linked together (like walking through a train from one car to another). In the movie, Russian astronauts and American astronauts are together in the ISS performing scientific experiments, etc. One of the wisest things ever done is to get 2 nations together in outer space hoping to keep us together peacefully back on Earth. It worked – until Putin invaded the Ukraine.
But back to the threat of nuclear war in the world – have you ever noticed how the writers of fiction (and fictional movies) seemingly are able sometimes to reach into the future and prophetically find and describe the future. There was an article in Reader’s Digest once on that years ago. They gave a number of different examples, one of them being Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea. (He described modern day submarines that did not exist then). Even more curious, he told the story of a rocket ship to the moon containing a capsule in which the men returned to earth. It was thought uncanny that the authors drawing of the capsule was shaped like the capsule in which real astronauts returned from the moon in 1969 (large rounded bottom, narrow at the top so that the bottom is always pointed down by gravity as it enters the earth’s atmosphere). Jules Verne’s return to earth capsule and the real capsule of 1969 which was filmed shows the prophetic reach of science fiction. They are even shaped the same – except the inside of the Verne capsule was upholstered and tufted like a camel backed leather couch with kerosene lamps on the walls for light.
As I sat in the movie theater watching this modern day movie about the joint Russian-American international space station (and remembering the Reader’s Digest article pointing out that the science fiction of the day curiously many times becomes a reality of tomorrow) I reflected upon all of this. In the movie, both the American and the Russian astronauts, in different ends of the ISS, received the same message from their respective countries “Take control of the ISS. Our nations are at war.” I then sat up in my seat in the movie theater when the astronauts looked out the windows of the ISS at the beautiful blue green planet wrapped in its scattered white clouds below, they saw first one mushroom burst of light (that only a nuclear bomb could have produced) and then another and then another – on one continent and then on another continent until the whole view of earth from the ISS was changed. Gone was the color of the blue green planet and its scattered white cloud cover. Our entire planet was lit up with the largest glow like a cauldron in a furnace – as indeed it was.
Dr. Lejeune often would say “I want to tell you a true story.” Now I want to tell you a true story about how this poem Prayer for the Preborn Child came to be. Some of you already know this story, but I must tell it again based on present world events.
The year was 1983. As a young lawyer, having only recently established my law practice in Washington County, Maryland, I had just had the Fritz case (father’s rights in abortion case). (I couldn’t believe it, but somebody sent me a clipping about that case out of the Los Angeles Times on the west coast.) It was one of the first, if not the first, cases in the nation that dealt with the question “What are the father’s rights in abortion? Should he have a say?”
Chris and Bonnie Fritz had been happily married for a number of years and had one child. They were expecting their second and had just freshly painted the baby’s room. They had a spat. She ran home to mother, and her mother took Bonnie to an abortuary telling her she never liked her husband and didn’t want to see her daughter carry another of his children. Chris went to the abortuary and pleaded with his wife not to do it, but was kicked out by the abortuary personnel under threat of calling the police if he didn’t leave. He telephoned my office from a pay phone, walked in off the street, and we put together an emergency petition for temporary injunction. Walking across the street, I had the Circuit Court judge sign it, and served the abortuary – just in time – Bonnie was to be next on the table.
Under the law, once a judge grants a temporary injunction in an emergency situation, the matter is then set in for hearing before the court within the next 3 days in which the judge decides whether or not to make the injunction permanent or lift it. Dr. Bernard Nathanson testified for me in that case which took place in 1982 and later it came before the Supreme Court of the State of Maryland just before Christmas that year.
But back to 1983 the next summer and the true story I must tell you. It has been said that “truth can walk naked, but a lie always needs to be dressed”. So I walk before you naked with this true story. It was the first week of August 1983, and my wife and I, together with our children, were on vacation on the Atlantic seaboard at Fenwick Island, Delaware with our dear Mennonite pastor friend, Joe Martin, his wife Ruth Ann and their two sons. After breakfast one morning, I hit upon the idea of trying to write something out ‘tongue in cheek’ holding a mirror up to our nation to show how we looked regarding abortion.
With pad and pencil in hand, I had what I thought was a beginning. It went like this as I recall, “We spend millions of dollars on Capitol Hill every year to try to find life on Mars (NASA) and right across the street at the Supreme Court, they have been unable to find it in the womb!” But I couldn’t get what should come after that. My wife came to me with the beach towels over her arm and the kid’s sand play buckets and she asked if I wanted to put the pad and pencil down and come join everybody. I told her to go along without me and I would be joining in just a couple minutes behind them.
We rented a little cottage in Fenwick every year known as the Anderson Cottage. It was a small ocean front cottage with a banging screen door and a little small screened in front porch looking out toward the ocean. I was sitting with my back to the ocean, alone on that little porch, stumped as to how to follow the beginning of what I was attempting to write – when all of a sudden, I had an experience I have never had before in my life and I have never had since.
It came to me out of the blue to begin writing entirely different words so I turned the page. And what became known as Prayer for the Preborn Child came to me from seemingly nowhere – and it came so fast I was afraid I would lose it. That is to say, the words flew through my mind out onto the paper quicker than my cramped, very poor handwriting could transcribe them. The words were getting ahead of me. I was falling behind, and I was afraid I would lose them. They continued to come in this fashion until I reached the end. And then all of a sudden, like a wave that is washed in upon the beach, it then began to ebb – and flow back from whence it came. It stopped. There was peace. There was no more, and I laid the pencil down.
After I collected myself, I walked out to the beach, and showed it to my pastor friend, Joe Martin, seated under the beach umbrella. He studied it and said to me, “Marty, when you get back to your office, I think, you ought to have this typed out.” I did so, and I had Copyquik Printing set it type – signed Anonymous – and sent it out with one of our monthly newsletters.
I put a copy of just the poem only in an envelope to my brother David in New Freedom, Pennsylvania (a salesman from Memorex – large computer systems for banks, etc.) He was to call me a few days later and say, “Marty, where did you get this poem?” I answered his question with another question, “Why do you ask?” He replied, “The reason I asked you is that I showed it a retired English teacher here in New Freedom and she commented that the way the poem was written – remember all those words from high school; iambic pentameter, meter, rhyme, etc.? We memorized them just long enough for the test and then forgot them. Well, she commented that it was “PERFECT!”
I don’t believe I ever did tell my brother where the poem came from. I know he wouldn’t have believed it, especially since he’s my brother, and he knows I have no poetic sense. I write things like the “roses are red, violets are blue” verse that we used to write on Valentines in elementary school.
I walk before you naked with the truth. It was a very humbling experience and yet at the same time, a very uplifting experience. An experience I have never had before and have never had since, but as I watched the movie of that ISS and l looked over the astronauts shoulders as they looked down upon earth with first one large puff of light and then another and then another until the whole planet seemed to be going up in flames, I resolved that I must tell you. As Dr. Lejeune would say, “I must tell you a true story.”
Note the word ‘nuclear’ in the context in which it appears in the poem. Ronald Reagan spoke the truth to us. At the time of his second inaugural address, the president let it be known that when he took the oath for his second term of office, his hand would be placed upon his mother’s Bible open to 2 Chronicles 7:14 because he thought it was the message to our nation at this time.
“If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land.” (2 Chronicles 7:14)
This upcoming election is in truth between those who believe in God and those who have gotten up and sat next to God and then told God to move over.
LET US PRAY! We need to put on “sackcloth and ashes” (a piece of burlap enclosed – pin to your shoulder lapel).
Yours very sincerely and respectfully,
Martin Palmer
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