No Screening Could Tell You This

People are talking about the value of life this week in light of a YouTuber announcing that he and his wife chose abortion for their unborn baby, and I keep thinking about my son.

Not as an argument.

As a person.

He is almost 20 years old now, which feels impossible to say because in so many ways he is still the little boy I have been raising for years, the one who needed extra help, extra patience, extra eyes, extra explanation, and extra mercy from a world that does not always know what to do with a person who does not move through life the way most people do.

He is intellectually disabled. He cannot read. He needs help with daily hygiene. He does not understand cause and effect in the way an man his age should. He has to be watched closely because he can do something impulsive— not out of rebellion or foolishness in the ordinary sense, but because his mind does not always connect the action in front of him to the consequence that may follow.

And yes, that requires real effort.

I don’t want to romanticize disability in a way that erases the cost, because that would not be honest, and it would not honor the many families like mine who are living lives that are beautiful and exhausting at the same time. My son’s needs have shaped our family. They’ve limited what we can do and where we can go. They’ve cost us sleep, flexibility, convenience, and little freedoms most people never have to think about. They’ve required his father and me to make decisions that didn’t end when he reached the legally recognized starting line of adulthood, because his dependence on us isn’t a childhood phase he will ever outgrow.

There is grief in that, and there are moments when the responsibility feels very large— moments when I look ahead and wonder how all of this will unfold as we age. Love, after all, does not remove every fear, just as faith doesn’t mean pretending that hard things are not hard.

But my son’s life is not measured by how easy it is for us to care for him.

That’s the lie I keep hearing beneath so many conversations about life, worth, disability, screening, suffering, and choice. It’s the lie that says a life can be weighed on the scale of anticipated difficulty, as though the highest good is ease, and as if parents’ visions of their own futures are the measure of whether a child’s life is worth living. The is a line of logic that says dependence makes a person less valuable, and the burden carried by others somehow diminishes the image of God in the one who needs to be carried.

But, friends, my son is not a diagnosis.

He is my son.

He laughs. He is present. He draws. He builds. He creates entire worlds with his hands and in his mind, and if you could see the way he works, the way his imagination moves, the way he takes ordinary pieces of cardboard and turns them into something only he could have envisioned… you would understand that there are gifts in him no statistical analysis could have predicted. He notices things the rest of us miss. He delights in details. He is funny. He is frustrating. He is loved. He belongs.

This young man is beloved by his siblings, not in some vague sentimental way that holds space for someone who is “less than,” but in the real, lived-in way of family, where love has had to learn patience and protection and humor and sacrifice. His brothers and sisters know what he requires, and they also know who he is. They have grown up making room for him, adjusting for him, laughing with him, helping him, being annoyed by him, defending him, and loving him in the ordinary, complicated, faithful way siblings love one another in a real family.

And in a sprawling family like ours, with some branches already forking into their own stories and others still reaching towards the sun and attempting to grow, this is especially beautiful. My son is not just a brother, but also an uncle. And one of his little nieces currently thinks he hung the moon.

When she comes through our door, she seeks him out because in her world, he is not a burden or limitation. He is Uncle Feen, one of her favorite people, and there is something about that kind of love that tells the truth with a clarity adults often talk themselves out of.

She does not see a category. She sees him.

And no pregnancy screening could have told me that.

A screening can disclose chromosomes, risks, possibilities, and difficulties. It can tell you some things that may be true about a body, a condition, a set of challenges, or a likelihood of complications. It can give information, and information can be vital. I am not pretending otherwise.

But a screening cannot tell you who that person will be.

It cannot tell you the horsey sound of his laugh, or the way his siblings have created a special mystique around him (he’s secretly in charge of the whole world, it turns out), or the strange and wonderful things he will build, or the inside jokes that will gather around him over the years. It cannot measure the way a family will be changed by making room for someone who needs more than most. It cannot predict the humility that may grow in a mother, or the patience that may be required of a father, or the tenderness that may form between siblings who learn, early and often, that not every life fits inside the same expectations.

A screening can’t measure joy, or love, or sanctification. It cannot measure the worth of a soul made by God.

As a follower of Christ, I am pro-life, but I need you to hear what I mean by that. In a world full of slogans and sign carrying and virtue signaling, even true things can become flattened until they no longer carry the weight they should.

But friends, I am not merely in favor of birth. I am in favor of life.

Life that needs help. Life that costs something. Life that does not fit neatly into our plans. Life that brings appointments, therapies, fears, tears, dependence, repetition, exhaustion, sacrifice, and a thousand small adjustments nobody sees from the outside. Life that may never become independent in the way the world celebrates. Life that may always require another person to stay close, pay attention, remember the next step, and guard against dangers that should have become obvious years ago but never did.

But also life that loves. Life that builds. Life that smiles. Life that is known by God and loved by a family. Life that has a place at the table. Life that is not less worthy because it requires more from the rest of us.

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This is where the Christian understanding of life must be so much sturdier than mere sentiment. We cannot only defend the unborn child in theory while quietly adopting the world’s assumptions about usefulness, ease, productivity, and autonomy. We cannot say every child is precious before birth, but then act as though the ones who remain dependent, inconvenient, disabled, complicated, or costly are somehow living lesser lives once they are here.

The image of God is not reserved for the high-functioning. Human dignity is not granted by intelligence, independence, communication ability, educational progress, economic usefulness, or the amount of effort required from caregivers. Worth is not something a person earns by being easy to raise.

Scripture gives us a better indicator of value than asking whether a life will be difficult. It asks:

Who made this life?

Who sees what we cannot?

Who numbers our days before one of them comes to be?

Who forms the child in the womb, not as an accident, not as a mistake, not as a possibility, but as a person known by God before he is known by us?

Psalm 139 does not give us a sentimental view of human life. It gives us a theological one. It anchors the worth of a person not in what we can predict, perform, contribute, or control, but in the God who creates, knows, sees, and ordains. That means the value of life is not up for conversation by mere men. It does not rise and fall with a diagnosis. It is not diminished by dependence. It is not erased by suffering. It is not conditional upon ease.

And I know that does not go over well in a world that likes tidy categories. But motherhood has a way of stripping tidy categories from your hands.

When you have sat beside a child who cannot do what other children can do, when you have watched milestones pass by without stopping at your house, when you have answered the same question asked by a specialist again and again, when you have adjusted your expectations not once but a thousand times, when you have grieved certain losses while also loving the child in front of you with a fierceness that surprises you, you begin to understand that life is far more sacred and far less controllable than we are often willing to admit.

You also begin to see how much of our modern thinking about children is built around fear.

Fear of inconvenience, suffering, and limitation. Fear of not being enough. Fear of a future we cannot manage. Fear of having our plans for our lives permanently altered by someone else’s needs.

But here is the uncomfortable truth: children always alter our lives. Every child does. Some do it in ways that look ordinary from the outside, and some do it in ways that require explanations and accommodations and long-term plans, but no child enters a family without asking something of the people who receive him.

The question is not whether children will cost us something. They will.

The question is whether cost determines worth. And for the Christian, it simply cannot.

We follow a Savior who entered into our helplessness, bore our burdens, took on flesh, and gave Himself for people who could not save themselves. The Gospel does not teach us to despise need. It teaches us to see need through the eyes of mercy and that weakness is not a disqualification from love. It proclaims that dependence is not an embarrassment, and that the lives the world considers least impressive are still fully seen by the God who made them.

My son’s life is not valuable because he is charming, although he can be. It is not valuable because he is creative, although he most certainly is. It is not valuable because his siblings love him, although they do. It is not valuable because his niece adores him, although the sight of that could undo me if I let it.

His life is valuable because God made him.

All the other things are gifts that help the rest of us see what was already true.

Maybe that is one of the mercies hidden inside this life we did not choose by design or schedule or preference. God has used my son to teach our family things we might have only claimed to believe otherwise. He has given us, right inside our own home, a living reminder that worth is not earned, that love is not efficient, that patience is not theoretical, that sacrifice is not always dramatic, and that the image of God is not reserved for the capable.

There are days I have carried this well, and there are days I have not. There are days I have been patient, and there are days I have had to repent because my frustration came out sideways. There are days I have trusted God with the future, and there are days I have wanted Him to hand me a map before I agreed to take the next step.

But even on the hard days, my son is not the hard thing. The hard thing is living in a world that keeps trying to convince us that ease is the highest good. My challenge is to keep resisting the lie that dependence makes someone less worthy and to remember when the future feels heavy that God is already there.

So as the world suddenly focuses on a news item that invites the question of whether some lives will be too hard to bother making space for, I keep thinking about my son.

Not as an argument or a political stand. As a person. A beloved son. A brother. An uncle. An artist. A young man whose mind does not work the way mine does, whose needs have reshaped our family, whose life has required sacrifice, and whose worth has never once depended on whether that sacrifice was convenient.

No screening could have told me all of that.

No test could have measured the joy of his niece looking for Uncle Feen.

No report could have explained the way God would use his life in our home.

And no fear, no diagnosis, no limitation, and no cost can erase what was true from the beginning.

My son was made by God. He is known by God. Jesus died for him.

And that is enough.

In Christ,

Heather

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