They're everywhere. We periodically get rid of what we think are lots and lots of them, but evidently books have figured out to reproduce, because we just keep running out of shelf space.
My point this evening being that whenever I need something to read, there's no lack. I should make the related point that with so many books so inadequately arranged, finding the book you need and know you have usually takes a long time.
So today I was looking for a book downstairs in the basement (which I never did find, incidentally), I ran across a book that I'd heard of, but never read, and that looked interesting.
It's Mortal Lessons: Notes on the Art of Surgery , the volume of essays by physician Richard Selzer.
I flipped through the pages, and they opened to me the chapter entitled, "Abortion." Well, I said to myself. I'll scan this chapter, and if he's all tragic necessity about it, it's back in the bottomless pit for this one.
It's not. You know, I've been involved in, attached to, aware of and interested in the pro-life movement for almost twenty years, and in all that time, I've never heard anyone reference this horrifying, painful chapter, and I don't know why. It's one of the most powerful non- arguments against abortion I've ever read - I say "non-argument" because it's a couple of stories, not an argument. And it begins with the most horrifying image one can image - the unimaginable sight that's left behind when a bag filled with "medical waste" spills on a city street. And it ends with the same horror, but on an individual scale, when in observing an abortion, he sees the needle the "doctor" inserted in the woman's abdomen moved:
It is unexpected, utterly unexpected, like a disturbance in the earth, a tumultuous jarring. I see a movement -- a small one. But I have seen it.
And then I see it again. And now I see that it is the hub of the needle in the woman's beely that has jerked. First to one side. Then to the other side. Once more it wobbles, is tugged, like a fishing line nibbled by a sunfish.
Again! And I know!....
[two pages later]...It is a persona carried here as well as a person, I think. I think it is a signed piece, engraved with a hieroglyph of human genes.
I did not think this until I saw. The flick. The fending off.
Sometimes pro-aborts wonder what all the fuss is about, why we bother, why we won't just go away. Here it is. The babies. The little miraculous merry zygotes. The pieces signed with the signature of their Creator. Oh, how did we ever come to think that we have the right to kill them? How?