Rhinocrisy

As you know, South Dakota has banned abortion. The law is particularly fire-breathing, including a five-year prison sentence for doctors performing an abortion and abjuring any exception for rape or incest (which even President Bush feels should be allowed). There’s some compelling logic here, after all - why should you kill an innocent child merely for the crimes of its father? And as we read here, most women who are victims of rape or incest decide to keep their child anyway. Just ask Sheryle!

Sheryle Bowers didn’t take part in research for Victims and Victors [a book by the Elliott Institute, a pro-life research group --ed], but her testimony tells the same story. She was just turning 12, and her family was in turmoil. Sheryle’s mother, Mary, was doing her best to care for her five children after her alcoholic husband left them. Then a suitor entered her life. She was attracted to him and appreciated the attention he gave her children. But unknown to Mary, the 29-year-old man, whom she would eventually marry, began a sexual relationship with Sheryle.

“He told me we needed to be very careful not to tell anyone,” Sheryle recalls, “or we would get in big trouble.” Sheryle’s childish desire to protect her mother from further pain caused her to keep the terrible secret.

Undetected, the abuser continued the incest for years, even through his marriage and divorce from Sheryle’s mother. Desperately wanting to escape, Sheryle tried again to end it when she was 18. In return, he caused her to become pregnant, hoping to force her to marry and go away with him.

The pregnancy finally revealed the awful truth, and the abuser left. Sheryle’s family rallied around her. Her mother, in Sheryle’s words, “scooped me up.” Though dealing with shame, guilt and embarrassment, Sheryle’s Christian beliefs kept her from abortion, and she gave birth to Christopher, who is now 21.

“I cried for two days in the hospital,” she recalls. “It’s not your ideal way to have a baby. But does that mean, for our convenience, we take his life?”

Overcoming the abuse took years, but Sheryle attributes her healing to God, and she credits Christopher’s birth as the beginning. “Finally God fulfilled a promise He had given me: ‘The LORD has taken away your judgments, He has cast out your enemy. The King of Israel, the LORD, is in your midst; You shall see disaster no more’ (Zephaniah 3:15).

“My son was really a gift from God because he created a way of escape,” Sheryle says. “The natural thing is to stay in the dark, to cover [the incest] up. Abortion is another way [for abuse] to stay hidden.”

Thankfully, now all women in South Dakota can “choose” life, just like Sheryle did, with the gentle encouragement of the State. And if bans in other states like Mississippi fall into place, women everywhere will be able to “choose” life! With any luck, Jesus will be SO pleased by this turn of events, He will come right down and sweep up the righteous^* and take them to heaven.

Exciting times we live in. It’s enough to make you ask, what should we ban next? Poll to the right!

Is the lack of cages for large numbers of humans. Thanks heavens that’s being taken care of.