To the Editor:

In a world that seems to grow more cruel as we demand that we are a Christian nation, another horrifying story hit the news. A 30-year-old woman was declared brain dead.
Her partner, her parents, and her 5-year-old son, cannot mourn her. They cannot put her in her grave. Instead, they go to the hospital to visit her, every day, to listen to the whooshing sounds of machinery that force her lungs to take in and expel oxygen. While her body lies still in a cold and sterile room.

On the day blood clots in the brain took this woman’s life, the fetus growing inside her was less than an inch long. The size of an olive. The fetus is also in trouble. Examination reveals that water is accumulating on the brain. The prognosis is poor while it continues to develop in the body of a dead woman.

If we let nature let it take its course, the way God designed it, this fetus would have died shortly after the mother. Instead, cruel laws in her home state require this horror to continue until the fetus dies, or until the 32-week mark—for a total of 23 -weeks, nearly six-months trapped in a dead woman’s womb— when the doctors can surgically remove it. The family will be forced by the government to go to that bedside, where this woman lies dead. With mounting bills, for care that none of them chose. With what is, at best, a scary future for a baby, if it survives. Unable to let go of the woman they love, not by choice but by governmental edict.

How is there room for the government in that small, cold, crowded room? How does the government have a voice in what’s happening there? When, somehow, there is no room for the government when it comes to decisions about whether a domestic abuser, someone who has shown themselves to be violent and potentially deadly, to have a gun?

For those who think this is God’s will? You need to be introduced to the teachings of Christ—about mercy and compassion and about love over law.

Pat Collins,
Fillmore, Ca.