I love feel good stories, don’t you? This story is definitely one of them. But I want to go beyond the feeling good part for just a moment and think Christianly about this event by asking a couple of questions.
(from article) “When Chad and Keri McCartney say their infant daughter, Macie Hope, is born again, they aren’t referring to religion — the month-old miracle baby really was born twice. The first “birth” was about six months into Keri McCartney’s pregnancy, when surgeons at Texas Children’s Hospital took the tiny fetus from Keri’s womb to remove a tumor that would have killed Macie before she was born. The second time was on May 3, when the McCartneys welcomed their surgically repaired — and perfectly healthy — baby girl into the world.”
Read this story, and then ask yourself:
- At what point does a fetus become a baby? (was Macie hope only a baby for while she was outside the womb?)
- Was she a person all along or only as long as she was wanted?
- As the article points out, and maybe it is the way we use language (but why do we use the language of “killing” and “alive”?), the baby / fetus was going to be “killed” by the tumor if it was not removed. So is the baby not “killed” when decisions are made to terminate a pregnancy?
I am not for a moment trying to be insensitive to the excruciatingly difficult choices that must sometimes be made by women / families, but this is important because little lives are at stake. My intention is to focus on the heart of the issue: is what is growing in the womb a person or not? This miraculous story helps us see what we already know intuitively–this baby was a born twice and was a person worthy of protection and the right to life whether inside the womb or out. Location has nothing to do with personhood.