Free B00AEDDPVE EBOK by Marie Osmond, Marcia Wilkie Page A

wand across my stomach, displaying the baby’s head and arms. Then he piped up, “Let’s get to the important part here. This better be a boy, or knowing my mom, we are going to have one more kid in the family besides this one.”
    Little did he know then how true his prediction would be!
    To me, a baby is proof that all of creation is in God’s hands and that we should always hold hope for the future, even though we won’t ever know what the future might hold.
    Human beings may have the intellectual skill to invent an ultrasound device that can view a fetus in the womb and detect the flicker of a heartbeat before a woman even knows she is pregnant, but no one has ever determined how a human being gets created in a very distinct order. Any scientist can explain how the zygote comes to be from the egg and the sperm and can even give a detailed account of how cells divide and multiply. Yet no scientist has the explanation for how one cell becomes the baby’s cornea and another cell becomes the spleen, while another forms the heart as another becomes the spinal cord.
    The process of growing a baby remains untouchable in its perfect order. There has never been a “new and improved”version of becoming a human being. Nothing that comes in a Tiffany blue box or on a canvas in the Metropolitan Museum of Art or is engineered by Mercedes-Benz perfection can equal the beauty, design, and miraculous order of creating a human life.
    My mother felt the same way and noted on a journal page after one of my brothers’ births: “
There is no thrill in this world that can equal that of having a child
.”
    I believe that it is the way the Creator delineated the genders from the beginning of time: To the male was given the seed and the potential to create; to the female He gave the ability to nurture that potential into a reality. The women in my long family line have believed for centuries that there is no greater calling than being a mother, nothing more important to the continuation of life. I include every female who carries a pregnancy to full term, even if she knows it’s not her child to bring up.
    I write these words as a grateful adoptive mother. I can understand that, even though a woman has the potential to create a new life, she may not be ready to raise a child, or even feel that the fetus she carries is connected to her in a mother-child relationship. Yet in her pregnancy and through adoption, her ability to bring the joy of motherhood to another woman is infinite.
    For my mother, a woman’s “choice” was whether she wanted to have sexual relations with a man, but if she did conceive, my mother felt it was no longer just the woman’s choice because now there was another life involved. My mother wasadamant that abortion was only to be considered in a case of rape or incest, but even then it should be a decision handled with much prayer and fasting. She wrote in one of her journals from the early eighties: “
Abortion should never be used as a form of contraception. That’s rationalization and justification on the part of a woman’s thinking.
” She didn’t surrender her opinion even when it became more controversial. She based her belief on what she learned from reading and pondering the Scriptures, which she also noted in her writings:
“As thou knowest not what is the way of the spirit, nor how the bones do grow in the womb of her that is with child, even so thou knowest not the works of God who maketh all”(Ecclesiastes 11:5).
Her love of all people and her willingness to defend the precious gift of life is one of her “thoughts to move us forward.”
    My girlfriend Patty, who grew up with me and knew my mother most of her life, said to me after reading this quote from my mother’s journal, “Isn’t it odd that our society is so fascinated by the idea of finding life on another planet, yet we don’t even honor the life that is on our own?”
    In the 1950s and early 1960s, when there was quite a stigma