Heaven or Hell for Children?

“Let the little children come to me and do not hinder them for to such belongs the kingdom of heaven.” Read it in Matthew 19:13-14, on the Christianity.com website.

Jesus is clear about that. But He didn’t say when they should come.

Pregnant women have a God-given responsibility to protect the unborn. If there is evidence of a severe disability that condemns an unborn child to lifelong suffering, if there is dangerous sexual and physical abuse in the household, if the mother lives in extreme poverty with children she can barely care for, if she is the victim of rape or incest or doesn’t want the child, she should not be denied the right to fulfill her obligation to protect a child by sending it to be with Jesus before it is born.

Texas’ new anti-abortion law forces mothers to abandon their responsibility to protect children, even though they are “regularly faced with the horror and prevalence of violence” in the U.S. according to Christianity.com.

It notes that “15 percent of sexual abuse victims” are between 12 and 17, that “up to 10 million children in the U.S. witness some form of domestic violence and approximately half of them are also victims of domestic violence.” And, when it comes to sex trafficking, “over 300,000 children are at risk of sexual exploitation. Its statistics show “an estimated 199,000 incidents of sexual exploitation of minors occur every year within the United States.”

Texas new anti-abortion law, “the heartbeat bill,”1 forbids abortions at six weeks, often before a woman even knows she is pregnant, gutting her right to protect her unborn child. The majority of the Texas’ White male legislators who passed the law and now uphold it, gave it a misleading name.

A fertilized egg doesn’t implant in the uterus until the 4th week of pregnancy, according to the Mayo Clinic.2 “The two tubes” that will eventually become the heart form in the 5th week. “Electrical impulses”1, not a heartbeat, are detectable at 6 weeks. Heart valves do not exist then1. The 4 chambers of the heart are not fully formed until the 9th week.

As a University of Texas biology professor asserts3, “…scientists can’t establish when a fertilized cell or embryo becomes a human being.” So how would an untrained politician know that?

If women can be construed to have a sacred responsibility to protect the unborn, what right do overrepresented4 White male Texas legislators have to prevent that? Will they pass more laws based solely on their political beliefs? Have they undermined their right to govern if they continue passing partisan laws?

Spurred by the 2020 census, which shows Texas’ Hispanic population is “now nearly as large”5 as the White population and will soon exceed it, Texans can expect more laws that suppress women and minorities over the next decade. Radical right Texas lawmakers will gather in Austin this fall, to redraw voting districts based on the census and its projections. More of their extreme partisan gerrymandering will give almost unassailable power of a minority over a majority in Texas, the definition of tyranny6.

Jodie Sinclair is an award-winning writer who holds a master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University and resides in Bandera, Texas.

1. https://www.texastribune.org/2021/09/02/texas-abortion-heartbeat-bill/

2. https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/pregnancy-week-by-week/in-d...

3. https://www.salon.com/2021/09/07/when-human-life-begins-is-a-question-of...

4. https://apps.texastribune.org/features/2020/2021-texas-legislature-repre...

5. https://www.texastribune.org/2021/08/12/texas-2020-census/org/2021/08/12...

6. https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/tyranny