The first person to recognize Jesus was an unborn child.
Luke 1:41 When Elizabeth heard Mary’s greeting, the baby leaped in her womb, and Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit.
I think it's fascinating that God wanted us to know about the faith of an unborn child who knew the Savior was near. Jesus spoke later on about the faith of little children. That's a neat connection.
Indeed, the Church teaches that the person of this child is created by God at the moment of the union of the sperm and the egg, and hence the child is itself given by God in the womb at conception, pure and sinless from God Himself... And David then goes on to say, in his great penitential Psalm: "For behold, I was conceived in iniquity, and in sins did my mother bear me... For this is true of us all, for all our mothers are sinners, and carry us in the womb in their sins, and all conceptions, except that of Christ Himself, are done in the lawlessness of extreme pleasure and its attraction for fallen man...
Hence the child given by God is God's, and not alone the possession of the parents, nor even the mother's... Which is why the consecration of a child to God by its parents is such a Biblically potent event... Often motivated by childlessness into old age in the prayers of righteous couples in agony of supplication... And in the Old Covenant, children were circumcised very shortly after birth, which was their general Covenantal consecration to God, and is why in the New Covenant they are Baptized into Christ at 40 days after birth...
I love Josiah's reading of books and singing of songs to his unborn child as it matured in its mother's womb.
I know a Vietnamese woman who was one of the boat people fleeing the mass executions by the Communists of those they hated - But she was one of those not yet born, in her mother's womb... And they floated for several months prior to being picked up by American ships... And she ended up being born aboard her boat adrift in the South China Sea... And floating there until rescue...
And twenty some years later, she fell in love with an American man who took her sailing, and they lived a life together doing a lot of sailing down into Mexico on his sail boat... The crime her family had committed was that of being a Roman Catholic family, and not Buddhist... The Communists of that time and place were predominantly Buddhists... So they were ethnically cleansing Vietnam after our withdrawal... Yet her pre and post-natal experience in and briefly out of her mother's womb in the boat of refuge stayed with her and is with her now as she takes her adult children sailing when she can... She is pretty much land-locked these days - Like me, the only sailing she gets to do is yard sailing the yard sales!
Children are very much alive and aware in the womb...
We encourage very enhanced participation in Church Services, receiving Communion, Anointing Services, and reading of Psalms aloud, by expecting mothers when they can do so, as a benefit for the child - And prayers without ceasing, and the singing of the songs of the Services throughout the day, and some children are born with very little, compared to many, of the burden of their mother's sins...
Killing them there is an ultimate child abuse...
We know not what we do...
Arsenios
