Recently, Family Life Services sponsored a seminar that was held at Cowley College. The purpose was to investigate the latest scientific research about life in the womb and how it is affecting the culture’s understanding of life issues. This was an important event because our knowledge of who we are and how we got here leads back to the moment we were personally created. It also affects gender issues, politics, medicine, sexuality, and, well, just about everything. For these reasons, this issue remains one of the most important moral questions of our day. To show that this is not just a political concept or even just a religious one, I quoted Christopher Hitchens, an author and journalist who is one of the most well-known atheists of our time.

“I do, as a humanist, believe that the concept ‘unborn child’ is a real one and I think the concept is underlined by all the recent findings of embryology about the early viability of a well-conceived human baby… I feel the responsibility to consider the occupant of the womb as a candidate member of society in the future, and thus to say that it cannot be only the responsibility of the woman to decide upon it, that it’s a social question and an ethical and a moral one. And I say this as someone who has no supernatural belief.”

How terribly odd it is that many of us who are otherwise charitable and thoughtful simply cannot see what is clearly observable, even to a child, or, importantly, to an articulate adult who doesn’t even believe in God. Life itself has a purpose. Aren’t you glad you were born?

Family Life Services is hosting its annual banquet on March 2, 2019. Miss Kansas, Hannah Klaassen will be the key-note speaker. Call 620-442-1688 for tickets.

(Tim Durham, M.Ed., is the director of Family Life Services, an adoption agency, parenting and guidance center and prenatal education center.)