Twenty-Six
One would like to think that a place of worship would provide a safe environment for people. Sadly, that no longer seems to be the case.
Not long ago, the largest mass shooting in the history of the state of Texas took place on a Sunday morning at a relatively small church in a small town. According to one report I read, every person who was in attendance that Sunday was either killed or wounded. As the news began to spread, it was widely reported that a total of twenty-six people lost their lives that day.
I was intrigued by the wording of a report posted a week later on nytimes.com. I found one portion of that report to be especially interesting:
The Texas Department of Public Safety said the victims included 10 women, eight children, seven men and the fetus of one victim, Crystal M. Holcombe.
The reason I find that wording interesting is that Crystal M. Holcombe was in her eighth month of pregnancy when the shooting took place. Both she and her unborn child (and other members of her family) lost their lives that day.
In the week between the shooting and the report I read, it seems that The New York Times found a “workaround” in order to suggest that a child who had been in the mother’s womb for eight months was only a fetus. If they had given the total number that had been widely reported, they would have included this unborn child among that number. Their worldview apparently would not let them do that, so they broke the numbers down in order to let their readers “do the math” and draw their own conclusions.
Some may wonder why the original reports used the number twenty-six as the total of people killed on that Sunday morning. The answer may lie in the laws of the state of Texas.
According to thehuffingtonpost.com:
Texas was among the first states to pass a fetal homicide law. The state’s penal code includes a definition of ‘an individual’ as ‘a human being who is alive, including an unborn child at every stage of gestation from fertilization until birth.’
I will not take the time or space here to delve into all of the scriptural, moral, and/or legal arguments that may help to explain why I am opposed to the evil of abortion. I think that the state of Texas did a pretty good job of that in their fetal homicide law.
Until the infamous Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision which was handed down in 1973, one of the safest environments for an unborn child was in the womb of his/her mother. Since that decision legalized abortion, that is no longer the case.
Since the decision in that case was handed down, a huge number of unborn children have never been blessed with the opportunity to worship or to do anything else. Their lives have ended before they ever left the safety and security of the womb of the mother.
That number of abortions is significantly more than one (the unborn child whose life was ended in Texas recently). It is significantly more than the total of twenty-six who lost their lives on that day.
It is significantly more than the total current population of the entire state of Texas. In fact, it is a little more than twice that number. According to the latest figures I can find, the population of Texas is 28,797,290.
As I type these words, the current number of abortions performed in this country since 1973 is 59, 937,525 – and counting! (There is actually a website – www.numberofabortions.com – that has an “abortion clock” which allows you see that the number change every few seconds.)
It is my prayer that the “creative reporting” of some segments of the news media will not somehow obscure the fact that every soul is precious; including the souls of the unborn. May we never forget that the number of people who lost their lives in a small church in Texas was –
twenty-six!
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AUTHOR: Jim Faughn
Photo background credit: Kelly Sue DeConnick on Creative Commons
