Sometimes a single event goes a long way toward shifting the direction of a culture for good.

Last week’s vote in the Mississippi House banning almost all abortions was one such moment when our representatives expressed the will of the people regarding the greatest human rights issue of our time. Not since the Emancipation Proclamation have Americans seen such a determined step to defend life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. And just as it was during the struggle to abolish slavery, our country now finds itself divided and morally conflicted as it comes to grips with the reality of horrific (but legal) human rights abuses occurring every day.

Since 1973, more than 45 million Americans have been burned with saline, dismembered, killed while partially delivered, and ultimately thrown away. The tragic irony is that this happens in a land where couples wait years and must sometimes have to search overseas in order to adopt a child. Perhaps now, as it did in the final days of slavery, the awful truth of what is happening in our midst will awaken America’s slumbering conscience and cause us to value the precious miracle of life within a mother’s womb.

Modern sonograms with 3-D technology clearly show anyone with an open mind what mothers have known and felt inside their bodies all along. Their unborn babies have beating hearts. These children move, sleep and play in the womb long before they are able to survive outside. They feel pain.

Unfortunately, many Americans willfully ignore the gruesome reality of abortion and choose to focus instead on high-sounding legal arguments of privacy rights and patient confidentiality. But abortion isn’t just a personal matter between a woman and the doctor who kills babies for a living. There’s always at least one other person involved whose life hangs in the balance and who would joyfully be adopted by one of the millions of couples praying for a child.

That child’s life counts for something to the Creator, who formed it in his mother’s womb, and to those who have yearned and waited years to hold a baby in their arms. There’s no such thing as an unwanted baby. The bill that just passed the House and is now before the state Senate would give unborn Mississippians the chance to feel what most of us take for granted — the chance to live.

Undoubtedly, there will be lawsuits, protests and demagoguery from pro-abortion activists elsewhere in the country over Mississippi’s abortion ban. Those who claim the ability to kill the unborn is a constitutional right and an indispensable characteristic of modern society will castigate Mississippians as backward. Pro-life Americans who express faith in the God of the Bible and therefore believe in the sanctity of human life will be ridiculed just as the abolitionists were 150 years ago.

Federal courts may argue and overrule what passed in the Mississippi House this week, but ultimately, there is a Supreme Judge who will decide whether a state that protects unborn children from destruction is backward or truly enlightened.



Craig Ziemba is a military pilot who lives in Meridian.