Dear Friends and Family of the Preborn Child,
We are truly “fearfully and wonderfully made” and our soul “knoweth that well” (Psalm 139:14)
Life begins, like everything else, at the beginning.
As a country lawyer in Hagerstown, Maryland (a city located at the base of Camp David in Western Maryland), I came into the prolife movement in 1982 when a father called me from a payphone outside the local abortuary. His wife was inside the abortuary getting ready to abort their second child. He had gone in to beg her not to do this and was told he had to leave or they would call the police. He went to a payphone and called me, and then came down to my office immediately (just a short walk away).
We hastily prepared a motion to enjoin (stop) the abortion. I walked it across the street to the courthouse. Judge Daniel Moylan signed it. We walked it up to the abortuary (she was to be next for the procedure) and stopped it.
When a court grants a temporary injunction, a hearing is set in within 3 days to decide whether or not to make it a permanent injunction. Dr. Bernard Nathanson of New York City testified in that case and somebody sent me a newspaper clipping about it out of the Los Angeles Times for the reason that it was one of the first such cases in the nation, if not the first, to deal with father’s rights in abortion.
We succeeded in getting a permanent injunction, but it was reversed on appeal and we lost the battle for the baby.
Shortly thereafter, I was asked to speak to the local Lion’s Club. Subject: The Reality of the Preborn Child. Dr. Nathanson had testified as to the reality of the preborn child. He explained that he had overseen the installation of the new technology of ultrasound machines in the hospitals of New York City which put ‘windows on the womb’. His testimony was summarized in the newspapers and it ignited a debate as to whether or not that which had been previously termed in medicine a ‘fetus’ was in reality a very small, miniature version of each and every one of us. Did she possess a soul as a preborn child?
In my address to the Lion’s Club one evening, it occurred to me to use an analogy of
What’s big’? What’s ‘little’? Dave Andrusco, a very capable journalist attended my address at the Lion’s Club and asked to come back to my law office afterward to interview me. He said he thought he had heard it all over the years as a reporter for the National Right to Life newspaper, but he had never before heard the analogy I employed and he said he liked it. So perhaps it’s worthy to be repeated here.
To share it with you, it goes like this:
“What’s ‘big’? What’s ‘little’?
To us a basketball player is big because he is taller than we are and an ant is little because it’s much smaller than we are.
But to God, what’s ‘big’? What’s ‘little’?
To us the earth is big because it’s so much bigger than we are. A grain of sand is little because it is so much smaller than we are.
But to God, what’s ‘big’? What’s ‘little’?
We look out at the stars at night (God’s knows them all and calls them by name .., Psalm 147:4) and see our own galaxy, the Milky Way, and beyond it other galaxies swirling like a Van Goh painting (his painting “Starry Night”) into infinity.
But as we look inward into the grain of sand with our electron microscopes, we see molecules made of atoms and – protons and neutrons, etc. – other universes in the other direction.
Its only because we stand at the point we do on the continuum of time and space that we are able to talk in terms of what’s big and what’s little to us. But to God, what’s ‘big’? What’s ‘little’?
I concluded my talk that night by postulating that if we could but see it, a 3-cell human embryo following fertilization figuratively glows with a white-hot incandescence – having just been released from the fingertip of God.”
Then I ended with this statement: “Perhaps God implants the human soul at the moment of conception rather than waiting until later on; less ‘bookkeeping’. For to God, what’s ‘big’? What’s ‘little’? He knew us before we were born. He knit us together in our mother’s womb. As we grew, we played trampoline and turned somersaults in the ‘Temple of the Womb’ (Dr. Lejeune used this phrase) which glowed with a red filtered light passing through our mother’s abdomen (something like the child later discovers camping out in his backyard in a tent when he holds his flashlight to his palm and sees the red glow emanating from the back of his hand).
Curiously, man chooses predominately the color red for the stained-glass windows in his cathedrals and churches that produce a red filtered glow throughout the sanctuary of his earthly Temple where he seeks God – reminding him of the ‘Temple of the Womb’ where God was present with him.”
Let’s take our case for the equal humanity and personhood of the preborn child to the steps of the Lincoln Memorial again this year on the anniversary of the Dobb’s decision. Take it above the heads of the Congress, take it above the head of the supreme bench (always but a political body pretending to be an unbiased court with a pendulum that swings alternately from the Culture of Life (such as the Dobb’s decision) to the Culture of Death (Roe v. Wade) depending upon the ‘political appointees’ to the court from time to time.
Let’s take our case above the heads of these political bodies. Let’s take it to God himself from the grounds of the Lincoln Memorial, our nation’s ‘Temple of Equality’ and thereby reach the consciences of the political bodies.
Martin Luther King prayed to God how and where to best present his case for the equal humanity and personhood of the black man. There is an inscription etched into the eighteenth step of the Lincoln Memorial, marking the spot where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech on August 28, 1963. It reads:
“I HAVE A DREAM / MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR. / THE MARCH ON WASHINGTON / FOR JOBS AND FREEDOM / AUGUST 28, 1963”.
The devilish distraction which will derail the prolife momentum we have going is to lobby in the halls of Congress on the anniversary of the Dobb’s decision. This is exactly what the March for Life did for fifty years – march to the Supreme Court, then disperse and walk across the street to lobby the Congress.
What is it they say about continuing to do something that has failed each time before? It’s a definition of insanity – actually the technique is a SANE distraction of the devil.
Fifty years of marching to the Supreme Court has been akin to spinning your tires when your car is stuck in the snow – you get nowhere.
The finest men and women in the nation – including pastors, priests, rabbis – marched in frigid temperatures and those who couldn’t walk had someone push their wheelchairs every January; and yes, it made logical sense to march to the steps of the offending entity – the Supreme Court that handed down the atrocity of Roe v. Wade.
But how does the expression go? “A woman (or a man, or a court) convinced against her will is of the same opinion still.” It took a change in the men and women on the court to overturn Roe and they brought to the court a new, fresh, changed heart growing up sitting in the church pews next to their parents hearing the Word of God and hearing their pastor, or priest or rabbi teach God’s Commandment Thou Shalt Not Kill. It wasn’t all the prolife marches to the court that they read about in the newspapers and saw on TV as they were coming of high school and college age that made the difference. They were nurtured in a sense of God-given morality in the churches.
And when 300,000 prolifers marched to the Supreme Court every January and arrived at the court what did they find? A cordon of police with zip ties and hand cuffs at the ready standing shoulder to shoulder (to guard the judges and the people inside the building). The devil didn’t have a countervailing mass of 300,000 people to march to the Supreme Court in frigid temperatures to stand up for the ‘right’ to kill one’s own preborn child, one’s nearest neighbor. So he outfoxed the 300,000 prolifers by gathering up 6 or 8 devotees of the Culture of Death with their little round blue signs (“Keep Abortion Legal”) and bused them in a heated bus where they only had to brave the cold long enough to get in the picture next to 6 or 8 of the prolife marchers with the police in the background and the image of the Supreme Court rising above it all.
The devil understands that ‘a picture is worth a thousand words’. Yes, there were pictures in the nation’s newspapers of the 300,00o people in the March for Life but people assume that the Culture of Death was equally represented because the photo that appeared on the nation’s newspapers was that of the court and the police and 6 or 8 people on each side of the issue (all that would fit in the frame of the photograph – you can’t get the 300.000 prolifers behind the policemen flowing up the steps of the Supreme Court in the photograph because they can’t cross the police line.)
By contrast, when Students for Life (“A child shall lead them…” Isaiah 11:6) held their first Celebrate Life Day at the Lincoln Memorial on the first anniversary of the Dobb’s decision (I was present), I had never seen such a peaceful, beautiful gathering and there was not one policeman in sight (there is nothing to guard but a cold statue of Lincoln inside). Vice President Pence spoke. If you were walk eighteen steps up the front of the Memorial, you’d find the step where Martin Luther King delivered his I Have a Dream speech to a crowd which flowed out on each side of the reflecting pool.
He got what he wanted out of the Congress and the Court by taking his case to God Himself at the opposite end of the Mall (the Lincoln Memorial – our nation’s ‘Temple of Equality’ – equality of the black man – and now our prayer to God for the lives of these preborn children by proclaiming, for all the world to hear, their equal humanity and personhood.
Let us pray and celebrate the anniversary of the Dobb’s decision from the grounds of the Lincoln Memorial.
Yours very sincerely and respectfully,
R. Martin Palmer
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