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When Does a Seed Become a Plant?



Over the last few years I have really enjoyed gardening, and this was going to be a big year. For weeks I had seeds from 10 different vegetables growing in soil in our house, waiting for the threat of frost to retreat with the winter. In the meantime I dug and tilled a 10x10 plot for the new garden, and eventually I moved the plants outside, making rows of 6 of each plant.

These plants were still very small and barely sticking up from the ground when it happened. As I was working in another part of the yard I heard my wife say, “Reagan, are you helping Daddy dig a garden?”

I turned around, and sure enough, our 3-year-old daughter was “helping” by standing in the garden and dragging her rake across my future harvest. By the time I got to where she was, she has raked the life right out of the garden.

When I realized what had been done, I nonchalantly shrugged my shoulders and said, “Oh well. It was just a potential garden.”

It wasn’t really zucchini. It was just a clump of cells.

A seed is a far cry from a beanstalk. They don’t even look alike!

I’m sure you don’t believe any of that because what was growing in my garden was a garden. The seeds were plants, just in their smallest form. The sprouts were signs of life, not signs of future, potential life. And when my daughter terminated the garden, she put a definite, permanent stop to what I was expecting.

I’ve never met a gardener who didn’t value each seed he plants or each shoot that emerges from the ground. He understands that the seed is life. As foolish as it is to think otherwise, that is precisely the analogy that abortion supporters use.

“Crushing an acorn is not the same thing as cutting down an oak tree.”

Of course it isn’t; they require different actions with different amounts of effort. But yet they accomplish the same end. Look outside your window and gaze at a mighty tree. Then imagine you went back in time a hundred years and crushed the accord that was planted. Now back in the present, that tree is no longer outside your window.

Crushing the acorn was the same as cutting down the oak. Both resulted in the loss of a tree.

Aborting a baby is not the same as murdering an adult because they require different weapons, but they result in the same thing: the loss of a human life. 

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