Fearfully and wonderfully made creation, Timmy Conner
Abortion is wrong.
I won’t lay out all my arguments here, but if you’re interested I did several shows on topic early on in my podcast (I was just getting started so give me some grace as you listen!).
One common argument in favor of abortion is the utility of the human in question. What kind of life will she have? What purpose will he serve? Will they be burdens or be tragically burdened? If a child is going to have a difficult life, and make the lives of those around them more difficult, isn’t it more merciful to end their life prematurely?
One of my best friends in the world, Wendy, made a Facebook post recently about her brother and the value of his life in a world that says he had no value at all. It was one of the most moving and persuasive arguments for life I’ve seen, and I thought my readers might also appreciate it. She has given me permission to share this post.
A little background: Wendy is a dedicated pro-life advocate. Wendy’s older brother, Timmy, was born with severe mental and physical handicaps. He could not walk, talk or care for himself. He medaled as an athlete in the Special Olympics, winning gold in the wheelchair sprints. He passed away a few years ago, but his impact on his family lives on. Wendy shared how he mattered after a somewhat sad exchange with an on-looker at a recent pro-life protest Wendy attended. She gave her post the moniker: What good was he?
“What good was he?”
On Saturday morning, I was standing with my fellow abolitionists at an abortion clinic in Bellevue, Nebraska. A man came up to me and asked me some questions about what we were doing there. In the course of our conversation, it went something like this:
Man: “What about parents who discover that their unborn child has a terrible disability? Shouldn’t they make the decision to ’get rid’ of the baby before it’s born, so that it can avoid all that suffering?”
Me: “Well, I had a brother who could not walk, speak, feed himself, bathe himself, reproduce or work…”
Man: “Well, what good was he?”
Me: “He was my brother, and I loved him.”
This was not the first time I’ve had someone make a comment like this to me about Timmy in a conversation about abortion, but this is the first time it happened face-to-face (not online).
This is eventually where you end up when you convince yourself that certain kinds of people aren't worth having in our world. If you believe there’s nothing sacred about human life, that not a shred of meaning can be found in suffering, and that some babies are just better off dead, then this is where your philosophy leads you: asking questions like this of people like me, about people like Timmy
Timothy Conner
So many people, too many, measure the value of a human’s life by what they can offer, what they can produce. They measure the value of human life by the amount of suffering one may have to endure. These are selfish measurements, even if we are deceived into believing they are measurements of mercy. They reduce our fellow humans to equations that tell us how much good a person will do us. Even if that person is physically and mentally capable, we worry their suffering will be too sad and uncomfortable for our eyes to gaze upon. That would mean we’d have to help.
As Wendy put it so simply and yet so movingly…
He was my brother…and I loved him.
And that is more than enough. In fact, it is all. It is love that gave Tim value and it is Love that gives us all value. The shallow thinker wonders what good Tim did for his family. The heart pointed towards a created order from a creator being understands Tim’s “good” was in his being. He didn’t have to give his family anything. He was loved simply because he was.
But all of that supposes that Tim and others like him don’t really have anything to offer outside of warm family feelings. Even if all Tim ever did was lay around helplessly, the love he provided by existing would be more than enough to justify his place in his family. To his family, he was an integral part of their story. His parents (God rest their souls) loved him desperately, and he taught them many valuable and necessary life lessons just by being their son. He led them on adventures through his athletic endeavors. He was a friend to his siblings, and Wendy reported that even in his final days in care, he was beloved by the clinic staff. Timmy was the embodiment of joy.
You can’t pay for that type of contribution in your life. It is priceless. Every soul we murder in the womb is the blind robbery of a kind of joy that may turn out to be absolutely vital to some other human being down the road. It is a unique kind of hell to live with the nagging, empty feeling that something is off and not all the pieces of your life are fitting together. I believe many of us who feel that are unknowingly trapped in a puzzle missing many millions of pieces, humans who were meant to love us, encourage us, or gift some important experience to us.
Sin ripped us from the Garden, but God, in His divine mercy, still gave us everything we needed to provide for ourselves. The ability to procreate and add to God’s creation is the most important provision we have for sustaining life. Yet, we deliberately toss those puzzle pieces in the trash, sometimes literally, and then wonder why so many of us are suffering these lifelong feelings of loss, displacement and incompleteness.
What good was he?
What good was He?
What good is Jesus?
Christ was once a baby, a brilliant display of self-sacrifice from the King of the Universe who made Himself the most vulnerable creature in order to be with His people directly and to rescue them. If we are bold enough to ask what good a life like Timmy’s was, we must be bold enough to ask the same about the Savior of mankind who was once a fetus, an unborn child completely dependent on the graciousness of his mother, who most certainly had barely an inkling of the magnitude of his value as she felt those first flutters of life in her womb.
If we would dare to kill a Timmy because he isn’t “good enough,” what would we have done to Jesus had we been given the chance?
Timmy changed his family. He made them all who they are today, even if he never spoke a clear word or said the words “I love you.” Even if he never helped a friend move or paid a bill. Even if he never cured a disease or helped an old lady cross the street.
Timmy was meant to be here and the world is better because he got to be in it. How much have we robbed from ourselves by denying other humans the chance to be in it too?
Thanks for reading Kira’s Substack! This post is public so feel free to share it.
Saw this the other day and Timmy's story made me think back to it:
"Why wouldn’t God have a unique purpose for every created soul? Why create replica souls? What does it do to the value of one soul if God were to issue a replica with which it could be replaced?
What makes a soul special is its irreplaceable uniqueness—the more in touch with your own soul you become, the more your unique insights, talents, aptitudes, etc can be rendered into works that no one but you could create. If God made you to be one-of-a-kind, then how could it be otherwise?
Modern society treats human beings, more or less, as if they were replaceable parts of a machine, rather than unique beings whose essence can never be replicated precisely because it prejudicially denies all concepts related to teleology and metaphysics. The fact that psychopaths ALSO view human beings as mere objects—as accessories or obstacles to their own purposes, and nothing more—is highly significant."
Saw this the other day and Timmy's story made me think back to it:
"Why wouldn’t God have a unique purpose for every created soul? Why create replica souls? What does it do to the value of one soul if God were to issue a replica with which it could be replaced?
What makes a soul special is its irreplaceable uniqueness—the more in touch with your own soul you become, the more your unique insights, talents, aptitudes, etc can be rendered into works that no one but you could create. If God made you to be one-of-a-kind, then how could it be otherwise?
Modern society treats human beings, more or less, as if they were replaceable parts of a machine, rather than unique beings whose essence can never be replicated precisely because it prejudicially denies all concepts related to teleology and metaphysics. The fact that psychopaths ALSO view human beings as mere objects—as accessories or obstacles to their own purposes, and nothing more—is highly significant."