It was a hot Thursday morning in north Texas. Sultry and no breeze. Pro-life volunteers were standing or kneeling, and praying along the sidewalk across the street from the abortion mill. Other volunteers were on the sidewalk directly in front of the it, offering the abortion seekers information about the help that is available to them in their time of need. Almost every week the abortionists at this abortuary kill forty-five to fifty unborn children. Each month the volunteers may save one or two by convincing a mother that killing her child is not the solution. But each “save” is purely and simply a grace from God. A miracle. This fact is confirmed by the knowledge that a distressed pregnant woman who has made an appointment for an abortion, who has raised the money for that abortion, and who has actually come to the abortion mill (usually with someone who supports her in this decision), is not likely to change her mind at that point. When she does, more is going on than just what we are doing.
But in spite of the “saves,” doing pro-life work on the sidewalks in front of the abortuaries week after week is not easy. Frequently it appears fruitless, and it is tempting to be negative. Planned Parenthood continues to kill thousands of babies each year here, and hundreds of thousands around the world. It has substantial political support, and receives millions of tax dollars each year. That tax money is in addition to contributions received from major foundations, and the millions that it earns as fees in the blood abortion blood trade. But pro-life work is essential to our moral and physical lives, and we must continue.
First, those in pro-life work are instruments of grace. With our limited human minds and understanding, we frequently have no idea how the grace of God works. Or when it works. What we may see as a failure, or more
likely not see at all, turns out to be a great blessing or miracle. When the angry father cursed us and went into the abortuary with his pregnant girlfriend, it looked like a failure to us. But when he walked out with her thirty minutes later, smiling and giving a “thumbs up,” it turned out to be a “save.” Similarly, we were sure that we had failed when the young pregnant women and her boyfriend listened to our pleas, and then got out of their car and walked to the door of the abortion mill. The woman, it turned out, was handicapped. As she shuffled along, knees bent and rubbing together, one of our group called to her. She told her that her own daughter-in-law, with the same disability, was the mother of her three beautiful — and healthy — grandchildren. The woman began to cry and embraced her boyfriend, literally at the front door of the abortion mill. It was clear that she had received the reassurance that she needed. She and the baby’s father walked back to their car arm in arm, and left.
As instruments of grace we are also witnesses to the truth, both the truth of the dignity of all human beings and of the evil that takes place in the abortuaries. Whether anyone in this city or this nation believes it or not, unborn children are human beings, and killing them is unreasonable and evil. Allowing human beings to choose who shall and who shall not be treated as a member of the human community is simply irrational. It is, therefore, morally repugnant. It is also dangerous. Dangerous to the victim obviously, but dangerous to the abuser who may be the next disposable human being. And so the truth of human dignity must be told, again and again, in words and in actions.
In his book, The Regensburg Lecture Fr. James Schall explains that one of the objectives of Pope Benedict XVI in giving his lecture at Regensburg University in 2006 was to address the unreasonableness of the use of violence to spread the religion of Islam. The Holy Father challenged Muslims to examine the irrationality and immorality of using violence and terror in the service of religion. However, Schall notes that if the Pope’s conclusion that religion without reason leads to Islamic violence, his diagnosis of a radically limited reason in the West, uninformed by faith and just as irrational and destructive, is no less alarming, especially as this deficiency is manifested in abortion. Contrary to media reports at the time, the Pope’s central purpose at Regensburg was to make a plea for the world to stand up and witness not only to the evil of religious terrorism, but to witness to the necessity of both reason and faith in our culture to avoid the violence that necessarily follows irrationality. His was a plea for a faith explained by reason, and a reason informed by faith.
In considering the Pope’s plea, Schall recalls the works of Russian author Alexander Solzhenitzyn:
One of the most memorable passages in my reading of Alexander Solzhenitzyn during the worst of the Communist era was his description of what was printed in mimeographed samizdat papers. These papers were hastily written, dangerously distributed accounts of a myriad of individual incidents that actually happened every day in the police state that was the Soviet Union.
Solzhenitsyn recognized that torture and police tactics could terrify people into “forgetting” or lying about what they saw. So if a certain family or individual was rounded up and taken to prison, there would be no record of this event unless someone carefully, with attention to time, place, and circumstances, recorded exactly what happened. The witness became the only person who could state what really happened. It might be dangerous to tell this truth. But our knowledge of what happened depended upon this testimony.
No doubt the same point can be made of the abortion killings and for the same reason. These killed human beings are demographically needed today. But they are not even acknowledged to have existed to be needed (James V. Schall, The Regensburg Lecture , South Bend, Indiana, St. Augustine Press, 2007, pp 85-86, 127).
So when the question arises whether those in the pro-life vineyard do any good with their prayers and their work on the sidewalks in front of the blood soaked abortion mills, think about what happens on those sidewalks. We go “on record” by our presence in front of those places of evil. We appropriately call our collective presence a “prayer vigil.” But it is a “truth vigil” as well.
We testify to the abortionists, to the mothers and fathers seeking the death of their innocent children, to those driving by in front of the abortuary, and, indeed, to all or our fellow human beings that humanity itself is at stake here. No culture can continue to engage in the mass murder of such a large part of its population, especially its demographic future, and survive, either physically or morally. This is not some History Channel documentary on Hitler’s death camps, Stalin’s gulags, or Pol Pot’s killing fields. This violent and unreasonable dehumanization of a part of the human community exists here and now, at Planned Parenthood’s abortuary in this city and at abortuaries around this country and the world!
Witnessing to the truth, in season and out as St. Paul says, is never easy, especially when that truth is officially rejected. But make no mistake, the pro-life witness to life is watched and observed by others. The abortionists watch, hoping that we will lose our nerve and resolve. But others watch too, hoping that we stay the course and fight the good fight.
Finally, our pro-life witness is in the service of reason, and therefore the service of God Himself because as the Holy Father told the world at Regensburg our God is Logos itself, and He has made all human beings in His image and likeness. Abortion is irrational because it contradicts nature and the Divine Plan, and it is therefore immoral. As Pope Benedict said at the end of his lecture: “Not to act reasonably, not to act with logos, is contrary to the nature of God.”
