The most common sights in my earliest days of sidewalk counseling outside abortion clinics (I started in January 1983) were women trying to sneak in, crying, hiding their faces, making excuses or telling outright lies, and sometimes rage at our presence.All of those are very rare nowadays. For abortion has become, to a large segment of Americans of child-bearing age, completely conventional. Yes, the facts about abortion's risks to women are more widespread than ever as are those relating to the prenatal development of the human person. And yes, the polls suggest that American youth are more pro-life than their parents' generation.
But those who do end up going to the abortion clinic are generally untroubled by scientific facts, medical risks, moral corruption or fear of God. Most of them know all too well that ending their pregnancy means killing their child -- they don't care. Their lives are so dominated by the self-interest of the immediate moment that they miss altogether the intense spiritual drama of the abortion decision. It is a blindness they will pay for the rest of their lives...and unless the grace of Christ's cross is appropriated, for all of eternity.
I'm well aware that pro-abortion spokespersons (and some pro-life leaders too) continue to insist that every woman dealing with an unexpected pregnancy does so with careful deliberation amid anxiety, fear, and moral debate. But this just doesn't fit the facts. Not the facts showing that the high percentage of abortions in America are repeat abortions. And not the facts a sidewalk counselor of nearly thirty years sees outside the abortion mills. For there, so strikingly different than previous years, we so rarely see tears from an abortion client or any other sign that this is a traumatic, difficult, crisis situation for them. Instead of the crying, the shame, the excuses or even the guilty anger, the women going into the abortion centers where their preborn babies will be killed are re-doing their makeup, adjusting their clothes, laughing on their cell phones, or kissing their other child in the car seat before Daddy drives off.
Moral sensitivity is dead. Religious understanding is absent. And unnatural affections for one's career, leisure and "stuff" leave no room for the precious, innocent and miraculous baby she has conceived and is carrying.
It's not just the continuation of abortion in America that breaks my heart. It's that so much of America isn't even ashamed of it anymore.
