I don't know what your parents would have named you, or maybe already did, but in my head I named you Joy because I knew you would bring them more joy than they would've imagined if they had decided to keep you. I am so sorry.
Their actions communicated that they didn't want you. That they saw down's syndrome as some sort of blight. I wish they hadn't. I can't understand how they did it especially when I know that being a mother and feeling a baby's movement inside one's own body is already the beginning of a bond, the fact that there is life in there no matter how much they argue it's just a fetus. How did they disengage from knowing you? How did they shut out the voice of God that tells them what is right and to not value a comfortable life over something more difficult but worthwhile and lasting? Dear Joy, it was not fair.
Dear Joy, we thought about adopting you. We were going to bring it up but they had already gone through with it and you were already in heaven. When I found out, my heart dropped and I asked the Lord to hold you in His arms, hold you close under the shadow of His wings. I know that's what He did but I had to ask anyway.
It's not fair my dear little Joy. I wish abortion had never been possible. There are millions of other little ones with you in heaven aren't there? I want you to know that you were wanted and you are loved. They may try to sweep you under the rug and act as if you never existed but you live on in my memory. Dear Joy, I wish they had given you a chance at life. We will meet one day in Heaven.
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Satan Hates the Little Children of the World
In his book Adopted for Life, Russell Moore says that Satan hates children and always has. History would say the same. In Scripture alone, we see the slaughter of the infants in Pharaoh’s Egypt and Herod’s Bethlehem. Every time the demonic powers forcefully oppose Jesus, “babies are caught in the crossfire.” Moore explains,
Whether through political machinations such as those of Pharaoh and Herod, through military conquests in which bloodthirsty armies rip babies from pregnant mothers’ wombs (Amos 1:13), or through the more “routine” seeming family disintegration and family chaos, children are always hurt. Human history is riddled with their corpses. (63)
“There is a war on children, and we are all, in one way or another, playing some role in it.”
Whether we look back over the pages of world history, or just around us today, the point bears true. Children are so often caught in the crossfire, so often hurt, so often the victims of a larger conflict in which they have no say, no influence, no responsibility. It happened back when primitive peoples thought slaying their children would appease the gods, and when war meant burning homes and sacking villages. And it happens still today when deranged citizens carry guns into elementary schools, or when abortion clinics welcome terrified teenagers with open arms, or when Boko Haram pillages another Nigerian village, or a young couple decides Down syndrome will disrupt their life plans. Moore writes,
There is a war on children, and we are all, in one way or another, playing some role in it. Every time we move forward as faithful parents (or care for kids in any capacity, including advocating for the voiceless not-yet-born, and volunteering for nursery duty on Sundays), we are wrestling demons — because there is little the demons hate more than little children. Read more here.The demonic powers hate babies because they hate Jesus. When they destroy “the least of these” (Matthew 25:40, 45), the most vulnerable among us, they’re destroying a picture of Jesus himself. (63–64)
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