Beyond the Obvious Darkness [Jay]

Our counselor services manager was conducting a training session here at the pregnancy center where I work part-time and they were in the midst of a particularly tough role playing activity. The scenario was of a hardened mother that had steeled herself to do what is “best for her” no matter how many alternatives are offered and one of the trainees commented on how tough this mock counseling was.

The trainer then told about a young woman whom she recently counseled. The young woman did not want to get an abortion, but said that when she told her mother she would be forced to do so. She left committing to carry her child to birth and to parent her child. When the counselor followed up with the young lady she was told the child had been aborted. The young lady told her mother about her pregnancy and her mother convinced her to get the abortion, drove her to the doctor, and paid for the procedure. My stomach turned as the story unfolded.

Women, even young women, cannot technically be forced to get an abortion they do not want. They can however be threatened, bullied, lobbied, manipulated, and strongly encouraged. The father of the child can and often does threaten to leave her. The grandparents of the child can and often do threaten to kick the mother out of the house. Friends can and often do assure the mother facing an unexpected pregnancy that not getting an abortion will ruin her life, restrict her future, and make it impossible to live the life they want to live. For all of the talk about abortion empowering women I have seen plenty of young women harassed into abortions by those people they think love them the most. More than I care to recall.

As the story about Coach Rick Pitino’s marital infidelity has come out and the fact that he paid for his mistress to abort the child that came as a result of their drunken tryst in a closed bar, it occurs to me that abortion seems so easy. It is such an easy answer for the unfaithful husband looking to cover his tracks. It is such an easy answer for the boyfriend not wanting to stop the party to be a father to his child. It is easy for the parents that see the future they dreamed for their child threatened by an unexpected grandchild. That is one of the hardest parts about convincing the world abortion is wrong. People can be intellectually convinced that the unborn are human beings of moral worth but when the chips are down and it is their life being affected abortion seems so easy.

You see abortion is more than 1.3 million mothers per year in the U.S. paying a medical professional to surgically destroy their child. It is also fathers persuading the mothers to kill their children. It is often grandparents bullying their child to kill their grandchild. It is a culture and a society that sees a path that seems so easy and cannot help but continue to venture down that path no matter how many polls say that more people are pro-life than not. It is unimaginably evil and its dark shadow is cast over our culture well beyond the women, the doctors, the unborn, and the intellectual arguments on either side of the debate.

As is so often the case, the seemingly easy choice exacts a cost that is profound in ways we never imagined when we set ourselves to the path of least resistance. Before we know it, we are a generation and a culture that is killing our offspring at a chilling rate and stopping means admitting we have participated in the violent deaths of our own children and grandchildren.

I will be doing a second post on how being aware of this fact must impact how we fight this battle.