GROUND ZERO, New York City, Jan. 22--Today is a sad day, a troubled day, a day of great conflict for millions upon millions who stand near or on the line of abortion.  It is a day when people are asked the question and forced to answer:  "When it is legally right to kill a child of the Children's Children's Children?"

        It is also the day to ask:  "Would you abort the Beast of Terror if you knew it was growing inside you?"
        Abortion, the legalized killing of children, celebrates its legalized anniversary in the United States today.
        Thirty years ago--one generation and 50 million abortions later--the United States Supreme Court ruled on February 22 in Roe v. Wade that abortions were legal.

         For many, it was the turning point in women's rights.  It cleaved the relationship a woman had with a man.  It gave her full, unequaled authority over her body.  She had the ultimate power of life over death, and unilaterally could chose to kill or let live the embryo inside her with impunity.  

        For moralists, it was the sign of the Devil.   Authorizing the "right to kill a child" was the work of Evil, a bloody signet that the moral demise of society had reached its peak and everything from here on was downward into the pits of Hell.
         America is still torn over the issue. Fifty-five percent of the population favors the right of a woman to have an abortion during the first three months of her pregnancy, 40 percent oppose it, and 5 percent are not sure, according to Time/CNN surveys reported in Time Magazine's January 27, 2003 issue.

       Asked if a respondent would consider himself or herself more pro-choice--favoring abortion--or more pro-life--protecting the rights of the unborn--the division was split more closely:  49 percent favoring pro-choice and 45 percent favoring pro-life.   The gap between the two is a mere Four Percent, a thin margin but a massive moral one when measured by the millions of children who never have the chance to become full-term human beings, who die at the whim of a legalized choice rather at the hands of Nature's will.
        According to Time's article, the rate of abortions has been slowly declining.  In 1990, 28 percent of women who found themselves pregnant had an abortion.   Two years ago that rate dropped to 25 percent.
        Between 1990 and 2000, the rate of abortions dropped from a high of 1.6 million a year 1.3 million, decline of 18 percent.   So did the number of physicians performing the operations decline, from 2,400 in 1992 to 1,800 today.

         But the battle continues on both moral and political planes.   Even though Republicans are vested with a Conservative anti-abortion agenda, 53 Senators are on record as favoring Roe, if not from personal convictions from a need to garner votes.
         The new generation of women are looking at abortion with a more jaundiced eye than their sisters a generation ago who sought the right to control the destiny of their own body's reproductive rights.  Time reports that 53 percent of women between the ages of 18 and 39 say they consider abortion an "act of murder."    For a generation raised on the principle of legalized abortions this is a startling percentage to pro-abortion activists, and signals a shift in attitude between a woman's rights and the moral rights of the unborn.
         Abortion is not the privy of America.  The Alan Guttmacher Institute reports that 54 countries allow abortion, representing 61% of the world population.  And, 97 countries have abortion laws that make it illegal according to the pro-abortion Center for Reproductive Law and Policy in New York.
         Listed below are some of the nations and their pro- or anti-abortion legal stance.

        China, for example, allows and encourages abortions if a child is deformed or handicapped, or if the "timing" isn't right, or, if the child does not fit the "sex ratio" proscribed by the state.
        For many, the issue of birth control goes to a problem of world population.  Abortions help control the explosion of human beings who double in size nearly every generation.  
        But there is a more ponderous question at stake that concerns us all when we are faced with its presence--Would we abort the Beast of Terror if we knew it was growing within us?
        For people like myself, this is a tough question.   I'm pro life and cannot fathom the idea of terminating it for any reason.  I know that were I faced with the decision in real life, I might be tempted to be swayed by emotions and circumstances, as any human is in a face-to-face confrontation with reality, but from a moral and intellectual view, the idea of aborting a life is like playing God or the Devil, I'm not sure which.   To judge the value of another human life is a choice I would not want to make, even thought as a warrior who has killed in combat, I might seem like I'm talking out of the side of my mouth.   But there is a difference between killing and being killed, and in holding up your hand and voting the death of an innocent human being who has yet to live life. 
        As I would not pass a parent or adult beating a child on the streets, neither would I turn my head and allow a suction tube to extract an embryo from the womb of a mother--would that be my choice.
        In Vietnam I witnessed the delivery of two children by village women.  In my own family, I witnessed the birth of my two daughters.   And, I have witnessed the magic of three grandchildren born and happy  in a world of great conflict.
        For me, personally, nothing is more significant than the beauty of a child's future.   All my life I have fought to shed my Beasts of Terror, to find some solace in life from my past where I felt abused and neglected and unloved.  I sought to repair that damage I suffered as a child with my own family, and because I believe I have vested my life in my children, in the progeny of making the world a little better by giving my children what I believe I didn't have, I honor children as the greatest of all gifts humans can enjoy.

        Children to me represent the true wealth of all humanity.  They are more powerful than any money, fame or fortunes, for they are the reflection of a person's true moral wishes, even if that person falls short of his or her own moral marks.  One can instill in a child values that he or she wishes he or she had, and correct misguided paths one has taken so that the child's path may be less littered with defects of character.
       Raising a child is often like coaching.   While the coach may not be the best of players, he or she has the intuition and wisdom to know what is right even though he or she may not be able to perform those functions with the skill of the child.   Teaching wisdoms does not require the skill of applying them, for often wisdoms are nothing more than heaps of mistakes one teaches another to avoid, and the proof of such wisdoms is often measured by the scars on one's back and the desire that the student is wise enough to avoid the same mistakes.
       This allows the imperfect to teach perfection.
       It is why grandparents are so valuable to a child, for a wise grandparent who has learned much by trial and error will bend a child's ear and tell about the crooked versus straight path, and forewarn the child of the dangers that lay ahead on both the beaten and the path less traveled.    The grandparent will offer the child choices that few can present, for the grandparent has traveled many roads and holds the map to life.
      Denying a child such wisdom startles me.   While a young parent may feel inept about raising a child and seek an abortion because of confusions or difficulties in understanding life itself, it seems the duty to raise the child in such a situation falls upon the grandparents, the relatives, the family members.

        I find it hard to fathom that a pregnant woman deny a child life based on the "trouble" a child would present in her life, especially if there is a family to care for the child.  But then I am a father.   A grandfather.   I love the pliable child's mind, the ability to help shape its beauty, to watch it grow as a flower in a garden.  I love pulling the weeds from the child's mind--to help it remove the Fear, Doubt, Confusion, Intimidation, Complacency that attacks it, and replace it with Courage, Conviction, Clear Thinking, and the ability to take Right Actions.
        That makes it easy for me to answer the question about the Beast of Terror's embryo's right to live.  If it were my choice, and I knew the Beast of Terror was implanted in a mother's womb, I would not opt to abort it.

       Even though the Beast of Terror is known to us all to be the source of Fear, Intimidation and Complacency, it still is a child of Hope.   Even the most wild and unruly child, the most incorrigible child, has the right to change, to evolve above his or her handicaps of inhumanity.
        It is easy to look upon a child as a burden, a problem, a dead weight, as lead in your arms.  It is easy to scream at a child to shut up when he or she screeches and bellows primal cries for food or attention, or when he or she is sick or afraid.   It is easy to tell a child "Don't bother me, don't you see I'm busy."   It is easy to teach a child to hate and to "do what it is told," and to threaten a child with either physical or emotional anguish.
       But it is hard to love a  beastly child unconditionally, with all his or her flaws and faults.  It is hard work to see the beauty of  a child's innocence beneath all its "unacceptable behavior."  It is hard to believe that a child's actions and behaviors are in a great part reflections of how he or she has been trained, managed, loved or unloved, cared for uncared for by his or her parents, loved ones, guardians and society itself.
        The Beast of Terror within us is the unruly child of our ancestors--the unloved, uncared for, undisciplined child that runs amuck like the bully on the street enjoying dominating others, or, like the sad sack walks around with its head hung low claiming to be a nobody, a nothing.
        The Beast of Terror is all our children whom we haven't given the respect of humanity, whom we have abandoned by the road to fend for themselves, and like  feral cats or wild dogs, they snarls and hisses at us, wary of our outstretched hand for fear we will backslap or kick them or pretend to love them and then get tossed out into the cold, dark night.

       All wild beasts can be tamed in time, with love and patience.  But it takes a great deal of time, and is dangerous for there is always the chance that the wild child will turn on its master, bite the hand that feeds it, retreat back to the safety of the dark primal cave from whence it was lured with warm milk and loving arms.
       Aborting the Child Beast of Terror eliminates the danger disappointment in the child, or finding one doesn't have the patience to manage the child's primitive demands.  

        But, aborting the Child Beast of Terror also is an act of Complacency.  It means we have given up Hope that we might one day be able to manage the Beast, treat it with such respect and consideration that he or she turns not against us, but works with and for us.
        We forget that over centuries and centuries we have taken the wild beasts from the jungles and forests and found ways to breed them into domesticated allies, pets, friends, buddies who give us unconditional love as we give them unconditional love.
        We also forget that we do not race out to exterminate all the wild creatures that attack us.  If a bear kills a human being, we don't kill all the bears to rid ourselves of the threat of being killed by a bear.  Instead, we learn to live with the bears.   We don't try to exterminate all the dogs that bite humans, or all the tics that bite and leave us with Lyme disease.  We let the Beasts of Nature live, in hopes we can blend our lives with theirs, respecting them and hopefully creating a balance between them and us that limits both the liability of  the Beast and the human.

         So why would we exterminate a Child Beast of Terror?  Why would we abort its life if we thought we might be able to teach the Beast of Terror how to live more comfortably with us, and us with it?  
         We would only do so for selfish reasons, based on our impatience to deal with Fear, Intimidation and Complacency.   Rather than trying to tame the Triads of Terrorism, we would convince ourselves that by eliminating them they would go away.  But they don't.
         In the U.S. we kill well over 1 million new lives each year through legalized abortion--abortion almost on demand for no just reason in most cases.    Then, those who kill their babies have to live with their Beasts of Terror that they did so.  

        Those who abort their children must at some time down the road wonder what that life would have been like, what that child would have looked like, acted like.    One cannot erase from her or his mind what a child might have been, or the fact that for $300 that child was sucked out into a tube, and any hope of its impact on human evolution erased.
         It is the same as I thinking about the death of those in Vietnam I hold onto.   I can never let their faces go from my mind, for their eyes always look at me no matter what I try to do escape them.    They are haunting eyes, eyes of life turned to death at my hand, and the hands of my comrades, my buddies.    They appear when I least expect, shadows of the mind that whisper:  "No right to kill...no right to kill."
         Back then, when I wasn't so wise, it seemed easy to kill.   Now, that I am aware of the Beast of Terror's wrath, I understand that the Beast  isn't so bad.    He brings messages to me that I must answer, questions that must be dealt with, and goals I must work to achieve.
         One of those is about the right to life that all humans have.  Do all humans have a right to life?  
         I must face that question with Courage, Conviction and Right Actions.  I have to say yes.  I have to say that I never had a right to kill anyone, even though I did it legally.
        I cannot hide behind the shields of war, or the authorization I was given to "kill" as justification for killing. 
        I cannot believe that a law is a justification for abortion.  Not now. 
        I believe life is more precious than the right to kill, except in self-defense, or the defense of others.

       Today, I would not volunteer to kill anyone, for any reason, because I do not believe that taking life is just.  It is not an act of Vigilance, but an act of Terrorism.
        So I would not abort the Beast of Terror, even though I knew it was hell-bent on creating suffering for those who were not Vigilant.  
         I would believe that the birth of the Beast of Terror would be motivation for all those who were ignorant of Vigilance to learn to manage and neutralize the Beast of Terror.  I would consider the Beast of Terror like an alligator, a wild creature we needed to learn to live with.
        I would also try to tame the Beast of Terror, wary always that it was wild and feral, but not unapproachable.  No beast is unapproachable unless we think it is.

        As for abortion, I wish all those who believe it is legal to change their thinking, and ask whether it is moral.   Is it right to kill the Hope of the future?  Even if that Hope comes in the disguise of a Beast of Terror?

Jan. 21 -- Tunneling Out The Beast of Terror