Mandy Baker Johnson

Like the majority of people in the UK, indeed in the Commonwealth, I’m delighted that the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge are expecting their first baby.  People are excited about this new life, already discussing names and speculating on whether this little one will be a boy or a girl, even whether the Duchess will have twins!

Yesterday, I came across Denny Burk’s comments about our reaction to the news and, particularly, the fact that we are talking about a baby.  Not a blob or a fetus, but a baby.  Interesting the way our terminology changes when we consider a pregnancy and new life to be precious….

Why aren’t we calling it the ‘royal fetus’?

Last Friday, I visited the Holocaust Centre near Laxton with Reindeer Writers, my local ACW writing group.  As I walked from the car park to the centre, I entered beautiful rose gardens, in the middle of which was a hexagonal monument with the names of the extermination camps from World War II engraved on each side.

The gardens were very peaceful with the trickling sound of a water feature and the gentle scent of a multitude of white roses, each with a plaque commemorating the name of an individual or family who perished in the holocaust.

Our visit began with a couple of short videos outlining the cold-blooded organisation and brutal terror of the Nazi extermination and concentration camps, and how the Laxton Holocaust Centre was founded.  We were then free to wander around the museum.

The centre aims to show how wrong genocide is, whether it be in Nazi Europe in WWII, Rwanda in 1994, or Darfur in this century.  At the beginning of the exhibition, I was interested to see a gallery of famous Jews.  I had never before realised that Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, Artur Rubinstein, Sigmund Freud and Albert Einstein were Jewish.  It is frightening how prejudice can completely blind people to a person’s worth.  Einstein’s written works in physics were burned by the Nazis simply because he was Jewish and, therefore, considered a threat to the Nazi regime.  This is utter madness.  Yet it happened… and made perfect sense to educated, reasoning people at the time.

The Nazis’ attitude towards children was interesting.  I saw a photo of a maternity hospital with an SS banner proudly displayed over the cots.  It was part of the Lebensborn (Spring of Life) Programme.  In this programme, young women with appropriate racial characteristics were selected to conceive children by SS officers in Hitler’s relentless request for a master race.  (Hmm, designer babies.  Does that ring any bells today?)  Not only that, but Aryan-looking children were kidnapped from occupied countries including Poland and Norway.  These little ones were then indoctrinated and raised as young Nazis.  Aryan-looking children were desired, so they were favoured by the Nazi regime.

But what about Jewish children?  Or children from non-Aryan backgrounds?  Their lives were of no consequence to the Nazis.  If small starving children forced to live in the ghettoes were caught stealing food, they were shot.

As I pondered on my visit, I could not help but be saddened by the fact that seventy years on, we still have not learnt to value the lives of those who are perceived as being a little bit different to us.  Tragically, a form of ‘selection’ still goes on.  If someone is smaller and more dependent than us, we feel it gives us the right to choose whether or not that person has worth and should be allowed to live.  Currently 180,000 abortions are carried out every year in England and Wales.  If it was wrong to exterminate human people in the Holocaust (and it was), surely it is also wrong to abort human people in the womb?

I was reading the latest Michael Connelly book this afternoon when I came across a piece of courtroom dialogue discussing the thickness of the human skull.  Like a bright shaft of sunlight breaking through cloud, it hit me that it was God who gave me my skull.  He lovingly and skillfully wove me together in my mother’s womb, and the skull He so carefully developed from my parents’ chromosomes is the one I still have!  I’d always taken my skull for granted, it’s just there protecting my brain and giving my face its shape.  But this afternoon a huge smile lit up my face as a wave of pure joy and a feeling of awe swept over me, and I lifted my hands and heart in a brief moment of worship.

How wonderful that God is intimately involved with the conception and development of human life.  He is the one who sets all the processes in motion, developing the human embryo from conception through the foetal stage to birth.  The Bible describes Him as being intimately and actively involved in this process (Psalm 139:13-17).  Marvellous though this is, it is not just a physical work He is doing.  He also knows all about the person we are from conception, our childhood, our teenage years, our choices as adults.  He knows what job we will do, all about our career, whether we will marry and have children, our disappointments and the things we will enjoy.  Even before our conception, God knows us (Jeremiah 1:5):  whether He will become precious to us or whether we will choose to disregard Him and suppress the natural human belief that He exists (Romans 1:18-23).

Your skull was woven together by God specifically for you, perfect for the life that He planned for you to live.  Ever thought to thank Him for your skull?