Shelburne column: A person who should be counted
Long before any of us were born, thirteen became an unlucky number. I remember when hotels and whole neighborhoods avoided using that ominous number because they couldn’t rent rooms or sell houses defiled with those digits.
I’m not sure why. Googling probably would tell us, but since I have never bought into this mindless superstition, I’ve never taken time to research it.
It did catch my attention, though, when wacky calendar author Jeff Kacirk recalled a weird “thirteen” event that happened three hundred years ago in London. When Joseph Addison reported it, he explained that a lot of British folks believed then that if thirteen people ate at the same table, the first one to leave would be headed for big trouble.
Addison said that when two ladies got up to leave a dinner, a last-minute headcount came out with thirteen. Panic struck. The women quickly sat back down and all of the diners began desperately searching for some way to dodge the hoax.
They yelled for a neighbor to join their party so their guest count would be fourteen, but the neighbor was not at home. Plan B was for all thirteen of them to rise and depart at the same time. Just before this mass exit, however, someone noticed that one of their female companions was pregnant. Adding in that unborn child brought their table census to a safe fourteen.
Why am I telling you this strange tale? Because it substantiates the historical truth that until this latest generation when we discard fetuses as garbage, people with Christian roots have always considered an infant in its mother’s womb to be a person with heredity and rights — in this case, enough of a person to break the thirteen dinner curse.
Check the laws in most states and — even in states that have legalized the highest percentage of abortions per pregnancy — and you will find strict laws making it a crime to harm a pregnant woman’s unborn baby if you hurt or kill her. I’m not sure how any lawmaker or judge can resolve the contradictions in these fetal laws.
In the early days of her own pregnancy, Jesus’ mother Mary visited her six-month pregnant cousin. Elizabeth’s baby (John the Baptist) jumped for joy in his mother’s womb. The babies in both women were already identifiable humans. That’s what the Bible has always taught us, but for half a century America’s abortion laws have ignored it.
Gene Shelburne is pastor emeritus of the Anna Street Church of Christ, 2310 Anna Street, Amarillo, Texas. Contact him at GeneShel@aol.com, or get his books and magazines at www.christianappeal.com. His column has run on the Faith page for more than three decades.
This article originally appeared on Amarillo Globe-News: Shelburne column: A person who should be counted
