Word Alive
By FR. BEL R. SAN LUIS, SVD
February 5, 2011
MANILA, Philippines – This Sunday is Pro-Life Sunday. A few years ago, there was a very touching photo reproduced and widely circulated around the USA.
The picture was that of a 21-week-old unborn baby named Samuel Alexander Armas, who was being operated on by a surgeon named Joseph Bruner.
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The baby was diagnosed with “spina bifida” and would not survive if removed from his mother’s womb. Little Samuel’s mother, Julie Armas, was an obstetrics nurse in Atlanta.
She knew of Dr. Bruner’s remarkable surgical procedure. During the procedure, the doctor removed the uterus via Caesarian section and made a small incision to operate on the baby.
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While doing the surgery on little Samuel, the little guy reached his tiny, but fully developed, hand through the incision and firmly grasped the surgeon’s finger.
The photograph captured the amazing event with perfect clarity. The editors titled the picture, “Hand of Hope.”
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The article explained, “The tiny hand of 21-week-old fetus Samuel Alexander Armas emerges from the mother’s uterus to grasp the finger of Dr. Joseph Bruner as if thanking the doctor for the gift of life.”
Little Samuel’s mother said she “wept for days” when she saw the picture. She said, “The photo reminds us that my pregnancy isn’t about disability or illness, it’s about a little living person.”
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The event is a powerful reminder on the value of life, especially on Pro-Life Sunday.
In the documentary film “Silent Scream,” you can see how a tiny fetus is deliberately sucked out of the uterus by the abortionist. The living fetus senses the instrument of death. It squirms and struggles to defend itself but the poor helpless creature is overpowered.
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The maker of the documentary is a former abortionist-doctor and director of the world’s largest abortion clinic in the USA, Dr. Bernard Nathanson, MD. From being an atheist and top abortionist, he was converted to Catholicism and is now making reparation by lecturing on the evil of abortion. His journey from death to life is beautifully written in his book, The Hand of God.
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Today, a Reproductive Health Bill is being promoted vigorously in Congress ostentatiously to protect women from harm to their health, but with all those chemicals and artificial contraceptives imposed, it is actually endangering their lives and even killing the unborn children by abortifacient contraceptives.
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If the Church has, time and again, maintained a hard-line stand against the RH Bill, it comes out of its reverence and respect for the enormous gift of human life which comes from God. We are only stewards and caretakers of life.
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