On January 22, 2001, exactly 28-years after abortion was federally legalized in the United States, Rae Carruth was convicted of "using an instrument to destroy an unborn child"—his unborn child. And though it is legal for mothers to pay someone to kill their children in utero, it is not legal for fathers to do the same. Had Rae Carruth been an abortionist, the law would have been on his side. Because he was an NFL wide receiver, he was convicted for trying to do what abortionists do thousands of times a day—kill an unborn child. I say "trying" because the men Carruth hired to kill his son and girlfriend did not fully succeed. After being shot four times, Cherica Adams managed to call 911. Though she would fall into a coma the next day and die a month later, her son, Chancellor, was delivered via emergency C-section. Sports Illustrated ran an article this week titled, "The Boy They Couldn't Kill." It tells the story of Chancellor Lee Adams, who is now a joyful 12-year-old, living with cerebral palsy and being raised by his maternal grandmother, Saundra Adams. It is a moving and miraculous story, and of course, it's chock-full of abortion-related implications.

The first thing you notice about Chancellor Adams is that he is the spitting image of the father who tried to murder him. That itself got me thinking. One of the most common arguments you'll hear in defense of aborting rape-based pregnancies goes like this: It will be too painful for the woman to be physically reminded of her attacker every time she looks at her child. Now think about the fact that Saundra Adams is raising a grandson who looks almost exactly like the man who murdered her only child. Does anyone suggest that it would be reasonable for her to abort Chancellor now, if the emotional burden became too much? Of course not. We do not execute children for the sins of their father. And if you read the article or watch an earlier interview from CNN, it becomes immediately obvious that Saundra Adams loves her grandson more than anything else in the world. She has never begrudged him his biological father. In fact, it is her relationship with Chancellor that has helped her to forgive Carruth.

After reading the Sports Illustrated article, I listened to an interview with the author, Thomas Lake. In reference to the remarkable grace and forgiveness Adams has extended to Carruth, Lake comments that, "To some degree, [Saundra Adams] had to (forgive Rae Carruth) in order to give all the love she has given to a boy who looks just like [him]." Don't miss the fact that what Rae Carruth did to Cherica Adams was even worse than rape. He killed her, and yet their son survived. If it's wrong to kill Chancellor to emotionally protect the grandmother from the memory of murder, how is it right to kill an unborn child to emotionally protect the mother from the memory of rape? Had Chancellor been successfully "aborted" as Rae intended, Saundra's life would be a far darker and emptier place.

As I've said before, the existence of legal abortion creates an expectation in the minds of selfish, young men that it will be employed at their bidding. Rae Carruth had played the abortion card before. Just a couple years earlier, he had impregnated a 17-year-old girlfriend and demanded she get an abortion. "Don't make me send somebody out there to kill you," he told her after hearing the news. She had the abortion. A couple years before that, a third girlfriend didn't have an abortion, but neither did Rae ever send a birthday present or pay child support, until the woman took him to court. Not happy with the arrangement, he told the woman not to be surprised if she got killed in a car accident—a threat he later said was made in jest. Though abortion is sold as a means of liberating women, more often than not it is a tool of imprisonment wielded by unscrupulous men. We can marvel at the calloused selfishness of Rae Carruth, but in many ways, he's simply a product of the system. Abortion teaches us that violence is an acceptable means of solving difficult life problems. Carruth is in prison for what he did to Chancellor and his mom, but Carruth walked away from the violence that claimed the life of his second child. Chancellor may not have an easy life, but he does have a happy life, which is far more than can be said for his older half-sibling, who was legally killed in the womb.

Another thing worth noting is that cerebral palsy is a condition that many people say justifies abortion—on the warped assertion that death is a better fate than disability. Like Gianna Jessen, Chancellor has cerebral palsy because someone tried to abort him. During the 70-minutes between the time Cherica Adams was shot and the time Chancellor was delivered, he was suffocating due to a lack of oxygen. His mother was losing blood as fast as the doctors could replace it. All the while, Chancellor's brain cells were dying. Had the procedure taken 10 minutes more, it's doubtful he would have survived at all. Chancellor was born blue, but you wouldn't know that now. Thomas Lake describes him as "slim and muscular, athletic if not for the hands that curl inward and the right leg that won't stand straight." And this is how Lake describes Chancellor's life:

[Chancellor's grandmother] taught him that the rain was a shower of God's blessing, and he believed her, so that when his schoolmates ran inside to stay dry he just stood there and let it fall on him. She taught him that he could do anything, that he had no limits, even though a neurologist told her he would never walk or talk, and now of course he can do both. He can ride horses. He started sixth grade at the end of August. He makes his bed and cleans his room without being told. He wakes up smiling and goes to sleep smiling and in between he looks like the happiest person in the world. On the spectrum of cerebral palsy, he is somewhere near the middle. Conventional wisdom says he will always need help, always be catching up, never quite get to normal. But you never know. Medical technology is advancing. He runs through his therapy with a blazing intensity, and [his physical therapist] thinks he could one day dress himself, prepare his own meals and walk safely around his own home. His grandmother believes he will get a job, get married, prolong the Adams bloodline and do many other amazing things. It may not be wise to bet against her.

Now contrast that account with a story published last year in the UK's Daily Mail. In it, author Sara Carpenter explains why she "had" to abort her son after he was diagnosed with spina bifida. She writes:  

Feeling my unborn son move inside me should have been a joyous moment midway through my pregnancy… Instead, every tiny movement made me feel sick with guilt at what I knew I had to do…

[A] consultant referred me to London’s specialist University College Hospital for a detailed scan which would help determine the extent of our son’s handicap. The scan confirmed that our baby would never walk. He would be doubly incontinent and paralysed from the waist down. Water was collecting around his brain, and only time would tell if that would impair him mentally… I tried to shake away the image I conjured in my head of a little boy, lonely and friendless, robbed of the most basic human functions… I hugged my stomach, as if I could in some way shield him from the misery that lay ahead. It was the thought of our son’s incurable impotence that triggered my husband’s tears. ‘Oh God, what sort of life will he have?’ he asked the doctors…

My brother James has a son, Anthony, who has cerebral palsy. When we shared our dilemma with James, he told me how painful it is to watch your disabled child struggle and suffer. Anthony, now 12, spent months in the neo-natal intensive care following his birth, and has endured several operations on his back and legs. He is still unable to walk far and needs his parents’ help to get dressed. He is highly intelligent and, while none of us could bear the thought of life without him, his frustration at his condition is evident. Seeing his younger brother, Scott, turning somersaults on a trampoline at a family barbecue, he grew angry and used  his favourite weapon — his vicious tongue — telling Scott that everyone thought he was stupid. Tears followed, from both boys…

When my older sister, Marie, a nurse who has cared for sick children, told me I should spare us all the suffering and have a termination, I was still shocked… Yet when I look back now, I am grateful for my sister’s words… I realised I couldn’t bring this child into the world, knowing the extent to which he would suffer. Andrew and I talked long into the night, and finally agreed that ending the pregnancy was the kindest thing we could do for our son…

At 18 weeks pregnant, I was too far gone for a surgical termination and would have to go through a labour and delivery, under the care of midwives at our local hospital. The first step was to take the drug Mifepristone to block progesterone, a hormone vital to pregnancy. I swallowed the pill in a side room on the labour ward — the same room where I’d given birth to our younger daughter two years previously. Over the two days that followed, I fought the urge to put my hands on my stomach when I felt the baby move. Knowing that he was slowly dying inside me was the very definition of hell. After two days, I returned to the same room to take a second drug to induce labour. What followed were the worst 16 hours of my life. They passed in a morphine-induced haze, but there was no dulling what was happening.  My baby was being forced into the world long before he could survive in it, and it felt unnatural — completely at odds with my instincts as a mother. My body seemed to be doing all it could to hold onto him, and the labour went on and on… Andrew, who was by my side throughout the labour, eventually decided to give me some privacy and went for a coffee. The midwife disappeared, too, so I was entirely alone when our son was finally born... Not daring to look at him, I screamed for help — and was alarmed to see the midwife recoil before reaching out to pick him up from the bed. When Andrew came back he was distressed, and not sure he could bear to look at our son, whom we had long before decided to name George. However, when George was returned to us, clean and dressed in crocheted clothes no bigger than those worn by our daughters’ dolls, Andrew held out his arms and cradled our tiny son just as lovingly as he had held our two daughters when they were born…

Three months later, Andrew and I spent a rainy January afternoon standing at a graveside in a corner of a children’s cemetery as George’s tiny coffin was lowered into the ground… In March 2008, a few days before the first anniversary of George’s due date, I gave birth to a healthy son, James, whom we named after my brother. James’s arrival brought great joy into all our lives, but we will never forget the son we let go…

In almost any context, abortion is an expression of pessimism and fear while birth is an expression of optimism and hope. One assumes the worst; the other hopes for the best. This is perhaps nowhere more clear than in the contrasting approaches to disability demonstrated by Saundra Adams and Sara Carpenter. Sara sees disability as a prison. Saundra sees it as an opportunity for unexpected blessing. Sara responded to disability by killing her son. Saundra responded by loving and helping Chancellor through the difficulties. Sara claimed to know that her son's life would be one of suffering and misery. Saundra refused to despair at the expert's assurances that Chancellor would never walk or talk. Sara says she can't imagine life without her 12-year-old nephew, but took his unkind word to a sibling as evidence that cerebral palsy is making his life miserable—not realizing perhaps that healthy children are just as prone to jealousy and discontent. By contrast, Saundra is thankful that Chancellor's cerebral palsy keeps him from harboring bitterness towards his father. "I think that's the beauty of having cerebral palsy," she says, "that he won't truly understand and feel the hurt and the pain that all this has caused." Sara grieves for her son as if his death was a tragic accident. Saundra says she has nothing negative to say about Rae Carruth: "I thank him for my grandson. I thank him for my grandson." Before the abortion, Sara Carpenter hugged her belly in an attempt to shield her son from "the misery that lay ahead," but there was nothing that could shield her son from the slow, painful, and fatal misery meted out by his parents. Saundra Adams never hugged her belly, but she hugs Chancellor every day.

One of Abort73's most popular T-shirts asks the question, "Would it Bother Us More if They Used Guns?" In a sense, the story of Chancellor Lee Adams answers that question, and the answer is a resounding, "Yes!" Thomas Lake observes that "pro athletes have done many terrible things over the years," but suggests that "this was probably the worst." It's hard for anyone reading the story to relate to Rae Carruth, he says, "because of what he's convicted of doing." To hire a group of thugs to shoot down your pregnant girlfriend after leading her into the trap and then blocking her escape is beyond contemptible, and his callousness over the decade that has followed is almost as bad. But make no mistake. All Rae Carruth wanted was the abortion. We know of no personal vendetta against Cherica Adams, beyond the fact that she was carrying his unwanted son. It seems that Carruth simply viewed Cherica as collateral damage. The world reads this story and is rightfully incensed. But all the while, abortion cuts down children like Chancellor by the thousands, every day, and the world is almost totally indifferent. Some of them, like George Carpenter, have disabilities, but the huge majority are perfectly healthy. A lot of the people who read this week's Sports Illustrated will be outraged at the behavior of Rae Carruth, only to turn around and have or recommend an abortion. That is moral duplicity of the highest order. Until we realize that there is no ethical difference between killing an unborn child with a gun and killing an unborn child with a medical instrument, the world will continue to be a violent place for abortion-vulnerable children. And unlike amateur abortionists, the professionals almost always finish the job.