Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you. Before you were born, I consecrated you - Hasta la vista baby!

·         Once upon a time, God had great plans for a beautiful baby girl. Her fate was sketched inside her mother's womb. She was meant to be nurtured in the garden of our Heavenly Father, and see bright light of the day with her starry eyes. But the world outside silenced her to death in no time. Her name was Esther.  

·         The remains of another unborn was placed in boxes and loaded onto a truck only to be dumped in a Californian field. Later after the gruesome discovery, those miniscule body parts were recovered for a proper burial and our son was named Christopher (Greek for Christ bearer) on his final abode. 

·         Joanne had two consecutive babies those were mercilessly aborted at a Los Angeles clinic. It was time for her to let them have what they deserved, and they were saved the trauma and indignity of discarded as medical waste. The mother mourned as she saw  a portion of her heart sliced in two halves going through the most peaceful transition ever - mere fetuses now addressed as 'babies'; Kieran and Susan were carried in  handcrafted caskets by a pallbearer and laid to rest under a granite monument stone with their names engraved. 

The fact sheet says, twenty-one percent of all pregnancies (excluding miscarriages) end in abortion. More than half of pregnancies among American women are accidental, and four in ten of these are terminated by abortion. Women in their 20s account for more than half of all abortions: Women aged 20–24 decide on 33% of all abortions, and women aged 25–29 settle on 24% of this unknown horror, which ascribes to multiple reasons amongst them - 

·         'I am not ready for it. Accidents do happen.'

·         'Having a baby will also amount to unprecedented duties and responsibilities of a harmonious family life. Will I be able to afford the cost it may incur?'  

·         'Single parenting isn't easy. I do not want my husband to have his negative influence on my child.' 

·         'I have just started on a lucrative career. I can't let motherhood interfere in my work at this juncture.'

There are 126,000 abortions taking place per day worldwide. In the each day, 4,000 embryos are killed in darkness. Planned Parenthood is the nation's largest  abortion service provider. What lies in wait is a voice that will speak out against this atrocious sin. An impalpable healing power that will provide some comfort and ray of hope to those post-abortive women. Mothers of Esther, Christopher, Kieran and Susan and many others who are made to meet a premature and brutal end at about fourteen weeks of development by prostaglandin abortion, which induces violent contractions. Thank Goodness there are associations like 'Cradles Of Love' that are of the opinion - LIFE BEGINS AT CONCEPTION. They rather feel that the unborn child deserves the same legal protections and honor as an adult. Ending such a life is equivalent to butchery to those who subscribe to this ideology, and hence the remnants of those babies must be offered appropriate cremation followed by a homage during the memorial service to throw light on the sick philosophy that we have been transmitting over the globe for quite a while now. 

The eternal question lies in - Are we really pledging ourselves to put a permanent stop to this heinous crime? Are we successful in lessening the solemnity of the crimes we commit, by way of trashing those scathed little lives in the dumpster thereafter? The answer is possibly a NO. 

According to the March of Dimes, as many as 50% of all pregnancies end in miscarriage, but nobody wants to talk about them. For centuries amidst many predominant countries, communities and their customs, this personal tragedy is viewed as a matter of victimization under the 'evil eye' and a subsequent shame on gestation. Spilling out the beans on this issue is as though tabooed, and those up for even the slightest endeavor to break the quietude around this loss are considered condemnable. For ages, women have been subjected to this agony of being told - either they will be doomed to infertility going forward, or it is 'God's Will' and hence to be put out of the mind like a nightmare. It has become pretty common now to deal with accepted behavior of baseless rituals that comes handy in books such as Laal Kitab  and also on accessing the virtual world. Young couples are made to undertake unlimited liability and misapprehension in the interest of Santan Prapti, and more often than not many modern families adhere to the ethos of 'Garbhadhana' (Rituals of conception) which calls for traditions like entering a room decorated for the purpose of copulation, performing  Ganesh Puja clad in white clothes prior to that, following which they chant mantras of Sparsh Kriya. Whilst there are nations like United States, that is obsessed with population control and bear a horrific record of more than 50 million babies having been slaughtered since the legalization of abortion in 1973, paradoxically, we have not been able to bow out an inch from our vulnerability as empowered individuals till date and stand up against being treated like engines, perpetually ready for the creation of lives one after another. For all those times, we, as women have already put ourselves out to reconcile with the intrauterine death of a child, we have all the more not been granted leniency. We are not supposed to while away time grieving over it, rather must focus on 'trying again' simply because it was at a very 'early' stage. Who cares about the  emotional and physical distress we undergo? But yes, the social stigma we bring along with our incapability to add another member, rather a male member to the family is indubitably unpardonable.

Thus superstitions and spells continue to haunt us as we are endowed with the status of supreme harbingers of life. We are women. We are expected to remember and pinpoint our fertile days of the cycle to carry out many such ceremonial peculiarities like that of wrapping a stone obtained from a water body in a blue cloth and tying it around our abdomen in the wake of the ovum. Needless to say, the stone is believed to eradicate all the negative energy hovering around the delay in conception of our newborn. Such fallacies within our well-meaning relatives are perhaps more tempestuous in nature than anything else. So much so, that they fail to even take note of our inner turmoil while getting carried away by those unfathomable myths. Similarly, many of us fall prey to old wives' tales and thank them for the rest of our lives completely burying heads in sand - the fact that no one else can say for sure if one has absolute control and knowledge on their bodies. Not even we, the sole in-charge of its anatomy! Human body in itself  is a mystery and attempting to decode nature's dictum is like looking for a needle in a haystack.

This involuntarily reminds me of an old acquaintance who had been unsuccessful for over ten years before sun shone on her and she was in her family way. She still believes the breakthrough was owing to a special friend who, to her rescue, gave her a fertility totem of a Buddha head that came in two pieces, symbolic of the male and female counterparts coming to biological unison and blessing the two parts with spirit of sacredness. She even went on to advising me of a couple of steps I could take up to add to my marital bliss by choosing the sex of my baby. 

'How do you like some tips on your baby making intentions? It's always nice to make the best of your future!' She chuckled.  

 As it sounded astonishingly amusing, I could hardly hold my horses to dig in further and get her on track, 'And how do you MAKE THE BEST OF YOUR FUTURE in making babies?' I retorted. 

On realizing she needs to validate herself at odds with all my gibberish scientism, she lovingly hurled back saying - 'I heard there was a little craft ritual you can do, only if you wish to. It is like making a small doll (like voodoo, I suppose) and sewing it up and stuffing it. This doll is meant to represent you. Before you stitch it all the way up, you are supposed to leave hole in the side and put this doll under your bed before you make love. Then after the deed is done, you take a smaller human shape (either cut from cloth or paper, pink for girl and blue for boy) and put it in the doll and stitch it all the way up and put it in a safe place.' 

The thing is, though various research studies claim that sexual positions as well as one's diet mostly affect the gender selection of a baby, there is no specific method to ensure such preferences. It is always the father and the male-provided sperm contributing to either an X Chromosome or a Y Chromosome that meets the egg cell in female XX or male YY offspring respectively. How many times are we able to detect the gender of those little butterflies fluttering  around and inside the fallopian tube except for forming an inexplicable bond with them? Never. The moment we are aware of the life breathing in us, it becomes an integral part of our existence. But one wonders - HOW? - a phase initial or advanced, it still remains dear to us, but almost everyone else fails to spot those invisible strings attached. And then one fine morning we bleed to damnation for a reason unknown and start blaming ourselves for not taking enough precautionary measures so as to protect our fetus. We weep and lament in private, wheeze in a void, and everything that once meant world to us, continues to torment like a catastrophe.

 We then join hands with those grieving mothers who have lost a chunk of their flesh and drops of their blood like us. Nobody takes the initiative and the pain to tell us that statistically, we are no exception; that  50% of all early miscarriages are due to chromosomal defects and uterine or cervical abnormalities which can't be termed as an imperfection. Rest may occur by dint of the hazardous toxins in our environment, our lifestyle choices (barring addiction to drugs and alcohol), increasing age and at times owing to an unfortunate case of  wrong medication and diagnostic procedures. There is hardly anyone to pull us up and give us a free rein from that sense of so called disgrace, as late as the pastor walks in to set us right and uphold a share of our anguish to the rest of the world.

Subsequently, looking at those divinely souls trapped in bruised and contorted bodies left open in the casket, we try to understand the lost sanctity of life. All the consoling, all those words of wisdom, nothing compares to the agony and heart ache of the bereaved mothers, who slowly learn to shield themselves with courage and endurance until another tiny seed of life is scraped out of their body. Life, however small or short it may have been, still knocks the door of paradise. And a piece in the mother always pines for a reunion with her little one on the day of judgment. Until then, it's a long halt. Until then, Hasta la vista baby! :)