What impressed me was the family’s attitude toward the miscarriage. They considered it a family tragedy and they mourned the loss of the two still-born boys.
It reminded me of a letter that Rizal in Spain had received from his mother. She was recounting her blessings. The blessings consisted of the number of grandchildren she had. She named each of her daughters and the number of children born to each. These, for her, were gifts from God.
It struck me that this Filipino way of looking at children as gifts from God is not only genuinely human but also profoundly Christian. How different from what the Pope calls the "culture of death" that prevails in other countries! In the United States the unborn babies killed in the abortion clinics each year number in the millions.
What is bad is not so much the fact that there are abortions. What is really evil is the fact that the killing of unborn babies is not only tolerated but approved, protected and even subsidized by the government. Abortion is the official legal doctrine of Congress and the courts.
A very large proportion of the American people disapprove of abortion. They are decent God-fearing people. But they are powerless in the face of a determined group who insist on imposing their culture of death on the nation.
On one occasion Congress actually passed a bill outlawing what is called half-birth, namely the deliberate killing of a child as it emerges from the womb. President Clinton vetoed it.
In my opinion, that veto was Clinton’s most heinous crime. He was accused of other crimes: dodging the draft during wartime; having an affair with one of the employees (for which he was proposed for impeachment). Bad as these crimes were, they were not as heinous as the veto of a bill that would have outlawed the deliberate murder of a child as it emerges from the womb.
This tolerance and approval of abortion and euthanasia the Pope has branded as the "culture of death". There is now an attempt to foist that culture of death on our country. It is embodied in House Bill 4110.
Let us hope that the congressmen and senators will reject this culture of death imported from foreign countries, and upheld the real Filipino and Christian values that respects human life.