A person's a person, no matter how small

My wife Jane and I have two little girls, Clare and Louise; Clare turns two this month and Louise is just over six months old. Clare is at a really fun - but albeit all consuming - stage. She loves nothing more than playing outside, and if she is not insisting on being pushed around in her plastic toy car, she is carefully dropping her toys in the wading pool, before picking them out of the water and starting all over again. Louise is beginning to shuffle around on the lounge room floor while learning about the world through studying a range of stuffed animals. Clare will now regularly come and lay down next to Louise on the floor and with an enthusiastic 'hello' proceed to take back those stuffed animals which she believes are her own. Everyday our daughters are growing and developing but they really are still just babies. They rely on us for everything, we are their nurturers and their protectors, their friends and their family. Their world is safe and secure because we make it that way for them.

But what if one afternoon in the middle of Clare playing outside I just walked away, leaving her in the backyard by herself with no food, no protection and no shelter. Her smile would fall and the frown would descend into tears, she would cry her eyes out, her nose would run and she would go to the back door yelling 'mummy', 'daddy', not understanding what had just happened. As night began to fall she would cry and cry, tears streaming down her face. She would be hungry and want her milk. She is not old enough to reason out her situation and create or find shelter in the yard. I really don't know, or do I want to know, how she would cope. Would she even make it through the night?

Alternatively, what if Jane and I decided to go away for the weekend and we left Louise crawling around on the lounge room floor. Having even less capacity than Clare, the little darling would do all she knew, and that would be to cry. Without water or any sort of nourishment I don't know how long she could last.

It breaks my heart to think of my little babies being abandoned and essentially left to die. Clare's little laugh and beautiful blue eyes would be no more; the gifts she would one day share with the world would be left unknown. We would never even know who Louise would be, we wouldn't get to see her dancing around in mummy's hat and daddy's shoes, we wouldn't get to see her grow and learn.

I recall a couple of tragic abandonment stories that came across the media in recent years. In 2014 a newborn baby was found after having being left at the bottom of a storm water drain in Australia for five days. In 2015, in China, a baby survived being buried alive for eight days in a botched up plan by the parents to kill their little son because he had a cleft lip. Once found and while being tended to by doctor's the boy coughed up a thick black substance which was the dirt he had swallowed while being underground; it was suggested that the rainwater provided the little one with sufficient moisture to have kept him alive.

Every day though, 125,000 little Clare's and Louise's are left to die; actually in reality they are not left to die, they are killed; killed in what should be the safest place on earth. For 40-50 million infants every year the womb will become a tomb. Imagine a little ten week old baby in the womb innocently sucking its thumb, turning somersaults and swallowing when all of a sudden a light appears and a hollow tube with a knife edged tip connected to a vacuum is inserted. It's job – to tear apart the little being; legs, arms, head and body. The one doing the killing will check they have all the parts before discarding the baby and ticking off the procedure as a success.

As you well know it's called abortion. In polite language it's a termination of pregnancy. In reality it is the murder of innocent children. I've heard the excuses, the reasons, the justifications but at the end of the day they are no more than delusions and lies. We as modern people in modern nations are murdering our children in the womb and there is no valid reason. As Doctor Seuss once wrote; A Person's a Person, no matter how small. We have to do whatever we can, according to our own situation, to love all children, the born and the unborn and to support those who care for them.