3,320 Children Dead

I submit the following with grave humility.  A most unthinkable tragedy took place Friday.   I know that some will see this and cry foul with charges of political opportunism.  But this is intended not as a commentary on the little boys and girls killed in the Newtown school but on myself and the rest of the nation watching.

Indeed, as I tucked my own one-year-old and her assortment of stuffed animals into bed later that night, I couldn't imagine the pain twenty families are now facing with the loss of their little ones.

There has been a thought, though, I cannot shake since my Facebook news feed lit up with exclamations of incredulity Friday.  Reading statuses bearing references to "innocent children" and an "unspeakable crime," a thought haunted me:

Twenty children died and the whole world was watching, while on the same day 3,300 children died and few paid any notice.

Why are we rightfully horrified by the thought of an intruder firing bullets into a kindergarten classroom?  Because we recognize the dignity of every born child and are outraged that someplace intended to be safe (our schools) became a scene of horror.

But what can we say of the preborn children killed behind closed doors as we turned our eyes to Connecticut?  They, too, were young human beings.  They, too, were killed in a place intended to be a safe haven from the world's violence.

But as journalists clamored to uncover every terrifying detail in Newtown, preborn babies were quietly dismembered, decapitated, and disemboweled--and no reporter covered the tragedy.

I admit that I, too, recoiled more as I read accounts of the gunman terrorizing the elementary children than I did thinking of the preborn lives lost that day.  Perhaps this is because images of the victims fleeing the school have been burned into our minds by the media.  Maybe it is because the enemy was so clearly defined.  Or perhaps it is because we are often more emotionally connected to and can more easily identify with kindergartners than preborn humans.

Regardless, we must not forget that our emotion is a response to--not a definition of--reality.  Strength of sentiment cannot transform the subjective into the objective.  The amount or lack of grief we feel has no bearing upon the humanity of the lives lost.

And so I do not chide the nation for turning our eyes to the bullet-ridden classrooms.  But I do abhor the hypocrisy of a society which mourns children killed by gunfire while defending the "right" to kill those younger.

And I urge that in between the shock we recall to our minds the following objective truth:  3,320 American children were lost Friday.


Photo Credit: CNN.com