This seems to be my week for obituaries. A few days ago I did one for John T. Elson, the journalist of “Is God Dead?” fame. Today it’s John Wild, the founder of ultrasound imaging technology.
Wild always knew his work could save many lives: It’s been widely used to detect tumors, for example. But when it first came along (late 1940s/early 1950s), no one could have guessed how many young lives it would save. No one even knew those lives would be in danger.
Ultrasound came to be known as the “Window to the Womb,” letting us see the miracle of human life from its early stages. All the bloodless euphemisms of the “pro-choice” movement — “products of conception,” “potential human” — have a way of melting in the face of the evidence of our eyes: It goes straight to our hearts, faster than the most solid pro-life arguments ever can.
How many lives have been saved directly by ultrasound, when mothers who’d considered abortion looked at their babies and knew they couldn’t go through with it? How many have been saved indirectly, by hearts and minds moved by the images long before life-and-death decisions come up? We’ll never know. Hundreds of thousands, surely. Millions, maybe. You? Someone you know? Someone you’ve met? Whatever the number, every one of them is precious to the Lord.
Newspaper obituaries give us no clue as what Wild thought about abortion. It scarcely matters: What matters is what God did through him.
So what can He do through you? A lot more than you imagine.
