COMMENTARY: One family’s loss of unexpected life

c. 1996 Religion News Service (Samuel K. Atchison is an ordained minister and has worked as a policy analyst and social worker to the homeless. He currently is a prison chaplain in Trenton, N.J.) (RNS)-We have been blessed in our marriage with two beautiful daughters. We were unaware that we had created another life until […]

c. 1996 Religion News Service

(Samuel K. Atchison is an ordained minister and has worked as a policy analyst and social worker to the homeless. He currently is a prison chaplain in Trenton, N.J.)

(RNS)-We have been blessed in our marriage with two beautiful daughters. We were unaware that we had created another life until the unmistakable signs of miscarriage presented themselves.


A baby, though unexpected, would have been welcomed to our family as a blessing. Now that this new life has slipped away, our feelings of grief and loss are deep.

Twenty years ago, however, long before we met and married, the situation was different for Fran. An unmarried graduate student unexpectedly pregnant, she opted for an abortion.

In those days it was a choice easily made. Abortion had been declared legal three years earlier. A baby simply didn’t fit into her plans. The health center of the prestigious university she attended provided a list of clinics that would perform the procedure.

But if a woman in 1976 can make life-and-death decisions based on issues like options and convenience, what does this say about the concept of”choice?”Does not”choice,”in this context, become synonymous with playing God?

Is the decision solely the province of the expectant mother or is there a transcendent standard by which the value of life should be judged?

In one situation, a woman feels relief because she chooses to end an inconvenient pregnancy. Yet time and a change of circumstance can cause the same woman to weep because an unexpected baby dies in the womb.

Should the value of a life depend on something as capricious as a turn of events or a change of mind?


Twenty years ago, an unwanted pregnancy was an inconvenience to an African-American woman in pursuit of a doctoral degree. Better to choose to have a degree, reasoned the friends who rallied to support her choice, than to exchange her career plans for motherhood.

In many respects, these friends were sincere. But in retrospect, she remembers, none of her friends urged caution. No one said,”Think about it. This is a life!” So, over the objections of her then-boyfriend, she chose to end the pregnancy. The precedure caused her considerable physical pain. And after becoming a Christian, she came to regret the decision.

In contrast, as we waited out the hours last week hoping the hemorrhaging would stop, friends and loved ones kept vigil with us, offering sympathy and prayers.

Fran’s colleagues urged her to rest, to take it easy, to put her work aside. In the maximum-security prison where I work, compassion came from employees and inmates alike. Why? This was a child we wanted.

The baby we so recently lost was about the same gestational age as the one lost to abortion 20 years ago. And we have both wondered in conversations since the miscarriage whether that first child might have been carried to term if abortion had not been so easily obtained.

The Bible says God’s love”covers a multitude of sins.”As a believer in Jesus Christ, Fran has experienced God’s forgiveness.


But we both have come to realize that even the unborn-however inconvenient, however unexpected-are valuable to God. Sovereignty over life and death is his domain.

The truth is that the life that was ended 20 years ago is no less precious than the daughters who today fill our lives with joy; no less precious than the baby who came so briefly into our lives, but we could not keep.

MJP END ATCHISON

Donate to Support Independent Journalism!

Donate Now!