Mary’s Choices

by Gene Shelburne

On the outskirts of Fayetteville, Arkansas, last week a colleague and I stopped at a traffic light behind a spiffy blue Chevy van. Shining out of one corner of the van’s back window was a red and white sticker proclaiming to all the world that it’s owner was PRO-CHILD/PRO-CHOICE.

“What could that possibly mean?” my friend asked. Let me assure you that he’s an intelligent guy. He knows how to read, and, being a hospital chaplain, he’s thoroughly versed in abortion arguments both pro and con. But the message on that sticker stumped him.

Plastering a “pro-child” label on an abortion advocate’s vehicle made about as much sense to my friend as pasting “Save the Whales” placards on a whale hunter’s boat.

Of course, “pro-choice” has always been an oxymoron. A spin-doctor’s lie. In practical experience it has always meant silencing all pro-life arguments so that a mother in distress is left with only one choice. Sort of like the election in Iraq, where Saddam Hussein was the only name on the ballot.

Have you ever pondered the choice Mary faced when the great angel Gabriel announced impending pregnancy? Since it’s almost Christmas time, maybe we ought to.

Shortly before his death, British columnist Malcolm Muggeridge penned some sobering reflections on this question.

“It is, in point of fact, extremely improbable, under existing conditions, that Jesus would have been permitted to be born at all,” Muggeridge wrote. “Mary’s pregnancy, in poor circumstances, and with the father unknown, would have been an obvious case for an abortion; and her talk of having conceived as a result of the intervention of the Holy Ghost would have pointed to the need for psychiatric treatment, and made the case for terminating her pregnancy even stronger. Thus our generation, needing a Savior more, perhaps, than any that has ever existed, would be too humane to allow one to be born.”

God picked the right mother for his Son. A right-thinking girl whose baby mattered more to her than her own comfort or her reputation. For that reason “all generations call her blessed.”