Life isn’t fair

Two universal truths most people recognize as absolute certainties are death and taxes.
But there is a third: Life isn’t fair.
No matter how hard we try to make things work out for us or others, life just happens.
Life itself is ambiguous, unpredictable and even chaotic.
While I believe there is an order to things, the natural course of life cannot be planned, cannot be predicted, and does not fit neatly in a bottle.
A large part of the reason why is because of our own imperfections. Our imperfect bodies and imperfect hearts have forged an imperfect environment around us, the imperfect world that we live in. As a result, we have to deal with its consequences; namely that things just don’t happen or work out the way we want them to.
Life isn’t fair.
While I’ve always known this truth, rarely has it hit me square in the face. That is, until last month when my wife and I received a telephone call that our nephew-to-be had died in his mother’s womb.
He was just two months shy of his due date when his heart stopped beating.
He would have been his parents’ first child, and the first of the next generation in my bloodline.
His loss hit us all very hard; none harder, of course, than his parents.
Over the last few weeks, I’ve found myself pondering more than any other time in my life the universal truth about fairness.
Why did my brother and his wife have to lose their first child, while America’s welfare queens seem to have no problem popping babies out and increasing their income? How come my brother and sister-in-law had to go through the pain of losing a single baby, but a histrionic and egocentric narcissist like “Octo Mom” can produce eight healthy newborns, which have earned her fame and fortune?
Is it fair that my brother and sister-in-law must go into debt to the hospital over the loss of their child, but “Octo Mom” can get a book deal, appear in magazines, and get invited onto the television talk show circuit just to tell the story of how a doctor surgically implanted eight fertilized eggs into her?
And is it right or just that a woman can casually select to abort an otherwise very healthy baby because her child is inconvenient and unwanted, yet my brother and his wife can’t even bring a child into this world?
The answer, of course, is that life just isn’t fair. Some people get all the breaks in life, and others don’t get any. Some people are born, while others never get the chance.
Millions of abortions have been performed in this country, terminating the lives of unborn or partially born children who would otherwise have been born alive and healthy had they been given the chance to live.
It is a travesty that people like my brother and sister-in-law are denied the opportunity to be parents, while other expecting parents can summarily choose to kill their unborn children simply because the child wasn’t planned; the parents weren’t ready to be parents; or the child was just an inconvenient burden to them.
My nephew wasn’t planned, either. He was a complete surprise. And my brother and sister-in-law were in no position financially to afford the costs of not only birthing a child, but also raising it. Yet, they wanted to give this little boy his life, because it was at no fault of his that he was conceived. They wanted to bring him into this world and raise him as their son the best they were able to.
But his birth and his life weren’t meant to be.
What burns me up about abortion on demand is that it takes the life of a child whose beating heart and functioning brain were meant to be. It is foiling nature and denying God the life He chose to breathe His spirit into. So many babies whose lives were meant to be are not here to claim their birthrights, because brilliant man in all his finite wisdom decided he could intervene and interrupt nature’s course; so he did.
Here we stand in judgment of unborn lives; we who were born and given life are determining the fates, the lives of others. That’s not fair and it’s not right.
Life isn’t ours to give or to take away. It is God’s and His alone to grant. When we determine to make that choice, then we are playing God.
Imagine that: Imperfect man trying to impersonate a perfect being. What an oxymoron.
Life is so full of contradictions like that, because it just isn’t fair.
And while I accept my nephew’s death as life not meant to be, I cannot and will not accept abortion on demand this way, because we really have no way of knowing whether life was meant to be or not. It was terminated before it ever had a chance to be.
Abortion, like life, just isn’t fair. But unlike life, which we can do nothing about, we can do something about abortion. The cycle of infanticide can be broken.
The question is whether or not individuals and communities have the courage to do what’s right, instead of settling for doing what they want.
Life may not be fair, but it does deserve a fair chance.