Prayer for Sanctity of Human Life Sunday

This posting raises in me some thoughts/ponderings:

• I am thankful that denominational staff have called the church’s attention to this important day of remembrance.
• The past number of years have seen the institutional CRC exhibit an “all lives matter” approach and message concerning Sanctity of Human Life Sunday.  I find this unhelpful.  Sanctity of Human Life Sunday originated specifically to call national attention to the wanton destruction of unborn human life.  A day of remembrance, petition, and lament loses some of its effectiveness if it is expanded broadly.  Yes, all life matters.  But making Sanctity of Human Life Sunday into a catch-all detracts from its original purpose. Adding disability concerns to Sanctity of Human Life Sunday detracts from due attention to the plight of the unborn in the same manner as if we broadened Disability Awareness Sunday to include the value and inclusion of the abled.  Consider this: if everything is special, then nothing is special.  A birthday is special to a child (in particular) because it is their birthday.  To say to your 4-year-old daughter that all of her siblings will be celebrated and given gifts on her birthday because all are special and were born at one time will be to solicit a quizzical or perhaps frustrated and angry response - the child understands this phenomenon.
• Perhaps not unrelatedly, the “all lives matter” approach lends tacit approval to the common slander that pro-life Christians only care about children being born and don’t care about them afterward.  By pivoting Sanctity of Human Life Sunday to a broad approach one gives credence to the slander in a “the lady dost protest too much, methinks” manner.  In other words, the proper response to this slander is to repudiate it, not to dilute the pro-life message of concern for the unborn. The slander that pro-life Christians only care about the unborn for partisan political reasons (wedge issue, culture war) and stop caring after a child is born is simply meant to delegitimize the pro-life message and distract from the horror of what abortion is. 
• There is language in this prayer that I find unhelpful, even morally deficient.  The sentence in question is this sentence: “For the unborn, grant strength, wisdom and compassion to women and men who face hard choices about ending pregnancies.”  Suppose we change this sentence up a bit for rhetorical effect so that it reads as follows: “For the children, grant strength, wisdom and compassion to women and men who face hard choices about killing them.”  About what other forms of murder would we speak in this manner?  Do we posit that it’s a “hard choice” whether or not to kill our parents, our neighbor, our spouse?  By using language like this the church lends credibility to the idea that it may be morally acceptable to in fact terminate a pregnancy.  This language introduces moral ambiguity where moral clarity is required.  It’s not a hard choice whether or not children should be killed.  Underneath any troubled pregnancy often exist very hard circumstances, and we should rightly acknowledge that and pray for strength and wisdom to deal with those hard circumstances. We ought rightly to pray and act on behalf of those facing difficult circumstances. But we can and should do this without introducing moral ambiguity into the question of murder.