There is something existential about sitting around the den during the holidays and watching home videos from when the children were young, dad was thin, and mom was trying to hold it all together amid the craziness.
In those moments, watching while sister holds hot chocolate, brother holds a glass of tea, and dad sips coffee, comments fly—like “look how dirty Tommy’s face was” and “Sally must have done her own hair that day” and “Mom still looks as young as she did then.”
Perhaps grandpa appears in the video for a second and silence falls over the room, for everyone remembers grandpa’s last Christmas with the family. And the disease that took him so quickly after that.
When we watch these videos, we watch life itself.
How nonsensical would it be for someone to step into the room while these home movies were playing and try to convince family members that what they were seeing wasn’t real? In other words, that Sally wasn’t Sally or Tommy wasn’t Tommy or that Grandpa never was?
Were this to happen, we would simply point the naysayer to the video for proof of life and laugh him or her out of the room.
What if we could sit and watch videos of our unborn children: videos of them at age 24 weeks or 30 weeks or 36 weeks? Videos of them sucking their thumbs (in real time) or yawning (in real time) or stretching or doing any number of other things (in real time)?
What if we could watch those videos before going into a “women’s clinic” or an abortionist’s office?
If we could, wouldn’t it go a long way toward putting the lie to the abortionist’s claim that the mother isn’t really carrying a child in her womb—that it’s just a “mass of cells” or a “bundle of DNA”?
Does DNA chuckle? Does DNA suck its thumb or yawn?
I ask because researchers working with advanced 4D ultrasounds have filmed 24-week-old children in the womb yawning and doing a number of other fascinating things.
Are we to believe these videos are unbelievable? Are they, like the videos of Sally, Tommy, and Grandpa to be rejected as fiction and discarded in the evening’s trash?
Far from it. Videos of children in the womb ought to be—and increasingly are—added to the family’s catalog of home movies. So that when Sally and her husband and Tommy and his wife watch home movies with their children, they can begin with videos of their children sucking their thumbs in the womb—or yawning or stretching or whatever they are doing when the camera rolls.
Whether you’re 82, 54, or 27 years old, whether you’re a toddler or only 24 weeks old, the videos show your life.
Sure, latching on to videos of our children at age 24 weeks is bad for abortion sellers, but it’s great for families. And in the end, few things in this world matter as much as families do.
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