Thursday, November 29, 2007

Amazing Grace

Last week My Hero and I watched Amazing Grace, the film about William Wilberforce's battle to end slavery in England. I highly recommend it. It's rare these days to watch a film that captures me heart and soul...where I can identify with the main character, and admire and respect him, and wholeheartedly agree with his goals. The main characters in most movies I've seen lately have little or no moral fiber. Or are just unrealistic heros, like Jack Bauer in 24, which is actually my favorite TV series ever, I think. And the romantic comedies, which used to be my favorite genre, I almost always have to set aside my actual views of life and how it should be lived in order to attempt to enjoy the story of two divorced people, or sometimes one who is married, or always they're in a relationship of some kind, "finding" each other...and generally the only form of attraction they have for each other is beauty, and shared circumstances, and some sort of emotional connection. I find it mildly entertaining from time to time, but the ones that grab me and suck me in are stories about struggle, and giving oneself to something truly valuable, and the love stories I like to watch are ones where there's an attraction based on beauty of character (Jane Eyre, Pride and Prejudice).

Well. This post was going to be about how I saw such a correlation between the slavery issue of a few generations ago, and the abortion issue today. It gave me a renewed sense of hope that change for the good is possible. It showed me that a nation's moral code is not necessarily always disintegrating...it can be built back up.

I was struck by how inane the arguments for slavery sounded. How could they have allowed it? I wondered. How could they not see how barbaric it was? They justified slavery with arguments of "We're actually giving them a better life," and "If we weren't doing it, France would do it and prosper instead of us" and "We have no evidence to show that the Negroes themselves have any objection to the slave trade." And the primary issue that made most of England's leadership want to keep slavery legal was the money involved. It was so lucrative.

I think while many people uphold the abortion option as a convenience (as I'm sure having slaves to do the housework was a convenience to many a British housewife), I'm also convinced that government funding of abortion related causes such as Planned Parenthood is the primary motivation for the big powerful abortion supporters fighting so passionately to keep abortion legal.

Our eyes have been opened since Roe vs. Wade, though. Now we can see inside the uterus, now we can keep tiny humans alive in the earliest stages of development. Now the line between life and unborn is blurring, fading...not even there? Our eyes are open. The facts are there. The truth is out. Now we just need a William Wilberforce and an army of people behind him to fight for good to prevail, to fight against the unjust, cruel destruction of these tiny innocent persons.

3 comments:

Nina said...

Sounds like a great movie. Yeah, I wonder if we'd had the medical technology we have today back in the Roe v. Wade days, if abortion would have been legalized.
My son used to love 24, and went through a long spell of never missing an episode. I watched it a few times, but it's way too intense for me. I was on edge the entire time I watched :)

Charlie said...

Amazing Grace is a terrific story. The comparison with abortion is a good one, and I think we already see attitudes about abortion shifting because of the advances in what we know, and the years of work the pro-life forces have put into encouraging women not to abort their babies.

I'm not very hopeful about changing the laws. But we are changing attitudes, and that's even more important.

Bea said...

I loved that movie too. I often wonder about the relationship between individuals like William Wilberforce vs. the historical conditions that allowed abolition to happen. As long as Britain's economy was dependent on slavery, moral persuasion wasn't going to work - but the reverse isn't necessarily true: if it were not for Wilberforce, Britain might have continued to be a slave-owning nation for decades after the collapse of most of their slave-run colonies.