The pulse of life. Heroic emergency workers will fight to try and save it. Medical advancements are made in desperate search to heal and prolong its energy.

Expectant parents rejoice to hear its sound throbbing in the womb. Those same parents may have to hope in an anguished expectation that a talented doctor can work within that womb to mend its weakened state. Still others, when aware of its quickening sound within, will seek a doctor to extinguish that spark of life that is the heartbeat.

The simplest way to verify life and death. Does the heart beat? And the most common of senses beats a path to the doorway of the conscience.

For the veil no longer lingers over when the life begins. The heart beats loud its evidence. Now the battle over the value and who will arbitrate the value of a life?

Stark lines are drawn between those who call to God as the giver of life and those who call on government to arbitrate who is worthy to live. Those who abhor an earthly litigation for life or death are now forced by that government to fund and support the very thing they despise. A thing history describes as tyranny itself.

It stands before us now that those who hold power will arbitrate life and death. If this is true, we are traitors to all that history has warned us. In the shadows, once so distant, nearer now in the hallows, the ghastly specters of humanity, who wielded horribly the power to chose those worthy of life and death, seem just a heartbeat away.

-Andy Torbett