Category Archives: Happy Birthday

The Birthday Parties that Never Were


By Larry Peterson

September 6, 1978, our daughter, Theresa Mary, was born and died. Once again I am posting about our fourth child and how she touched our lives. If she had lived this would have been her 37th birthday. She might have had children like her older sister, Mary Dymphna. Maybe Mary and her little sister would have been best friends and confidants. Their kids would have been cousins. We probably would have all gotten together and had a party with cake and ice-cream and sang “Happy Birthday” like we and all of you do on these occasions. However, like so many other families, we have those empty days of birthday parties that never were.

I am writing about this again because of the incredible disregard for life that now exists in our society. Planned Parenthood, marketed and promoted as the bastion of women’s health in America, performs more abortions than any other organization in the country. It receives over one-half billion dollars a year in government funding and recently it has come to light that it is nothing more than a “chop-shop” for human body parts. Theresa Mary was in her sixth month of development and could have fit their criteria for body parts perfectly.

At the beginning of Loretta’s sixth month of pregnancy she unexpectedly went into labor. Bleeding profusely she was rushed by ambulance to the hospital and our fourth child, a daughter, was born. She also lived and died very quickly, within minutes.  I had called ahead to Holy Trinity Catholic Church and a priest, Father Murray, was waiting for our arrival. Our baby was baptized and buried with my parents. She was our child, she was real and was a gift from God.

Theresa was not simply a “fetus”.  She was not “products of conception”. She was not an “annoyance”, or an extra pair of shoes to worry about or another potentially “sleepless night”. She did not mean  less money in the bank.  No, Theresa Mary was worth far more than any of that multiplied a thousand times over.  Nothing can change the fact that she did exist. In God’s world there is no “time” as we know it. HE lives in the “Eternal Now”.  Theresa Mary now lives there with HIM. (I like to think she is close friends with her namesake, St. Therese)

So, as I contemplate what might have been in my own family’s life, I wonder what might have been in millions upon millions of other families. How many millions of birthday parties have never been celebrated? How many doctors, scientists, priests, nuns, teachers, baseball players, carpenters and astronauts, surgeons, auto-mechanics, hair-dressers, waitresses,  pharmacists and even trash collectors and hot dog vendors never made it past life in the womb? How many  living children in-vitro, with their own DNA and their own legs, arms, hands and feet, kidneys and livers and hearts and lungs, have been destroyed out of convenience or maybe just for those body parts?  Roe v Wade has been protecting this heinous behavior since 1973. Whatever have we wrought?

So I say “Happy Birthday” to Theresa Mary. You lived and died and the world will always know it You were NOT a “product of conception” or a piece of “tissue”. You were a living person. So many more like you were never given that recognition. It is a sad, sad, thing.

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