I got a photo today of a one-week-old baby. I met her mother when she was leaving an abortion clinic after taking the first abortion pill for a chemical at-home abortion. She was 17 then, and every pressure in her life was to have an abortion. She hadn’t finished high school.
I actually intervened early in my latter-day sidewalk-counseling career on a conversation another sidewalk counselor was having with her. The other counselor has been doing it for much longer. She spoke to her about what the abortion would look like — the baby would wind up being flushed down her toilet. So I rushed in — which is terrible sidewalk-counseling etiquette — and smiled like a goofball and told her about the Sisters of Life. (Who the other sidewalk counselor was on the road to connecting her with, too.) Two of the sisters did wind up talking with her and making plans with her to meet later that day and get her to a doctor to reverse the effects of the first pill. She never made the appointment with the sisters.
The same girl found herself pregnant again some months later. The pressure was on again. Later in the pregnancy this time, someone at Planned Parenthood told her that the baby’s heartbeat would be stopped, as the abortion was explained. That was the end of that abortion for her. She reached out to that woman who had told her the blunt truth that day. Now she had a great beautiful gift in her hands, having reconnected with the counselor and the sisters.
I share this with rough details protecting the identities of people because a) Everyone has a role. I cringe at photos of abortions and people telling women in crisis what abortion is sometimes, but sometimes it lays a groundwork. b) Presence means something. c) Connections can be powerful — even if not in the way you expected. d) Real scared people are having abortions daily, and here in New York the people who are trying to help are treated with open disdain and hostility. Please pray for a spirit of truth to overwhelm the fog and darkness and show the way to something life-giving and joyful. There are a lot of impossible-seeming scenarios out there. We need to meet the needs, not insist that murder is the way, for anyone. There are real people being hurt — and lives ended for some 50 years now legally — in the name of endless disingenuous euphemisms that mask the intimate violence we look away from daily.