My mother hadn’t known that she had any other choices. She was in the military, overseas, had a brief affair with a man who already had four kids and wound up pregnant. The father was already elsewhere by the time she knew she was pregnant, and she couldn’t bring herself to tell him. She was on and off with my father and had hopes of marrying him some day, and was petrified of telling him she’d gotten pregnant by someone else. Given the societal view of out-of-wedlock pregnancies of the time, she feared her liberal adoptive family wouldn’t support her. She didn’t find out until years later that both her family and my father would have supported her completely - which they both proved a few years later when a similar scenario occurred with my sister. My dad married her anyway, and to see the pictures of him holding her after she was born, I didn’t know for nearly twenty years of my life that he wasn’t her dad. Sadly, she died at six weeks, and unfortunately my mom’s scars from her abortion ripped open in her heart when that happened, believing she was being punished for what she’d done. It took a great deal of patience and compassion on my father’s part, and my own coming into the world and surviving, to help change her mind of that.
I share my mother’s story as I just have, as well as my own. I never had an abortion, but my mother’s abortion affected my life. While I had the fortune not to have lived such a dark and sad life as yours, it is still mine, and the pain and trouble is my pain and therefor significant to me. My father has his story to tell, as well, his regret in not having had the chance to tell my mother that he would have loved that baby as his own in time to save it, the pain in the fact that they’d never been able to have a child after me, and never the financial security to adopt.
I am truly sorry for what you’ve gone through, and I appreciate your sharing your story. It helps me and everyone else here know where you’re coming from.
Some people don’t have the courage to ask. I don’t just go up to random frightened pregnant teens and tell them about my mom’s story. But I do start a conversation. I listen to them, to where they’re coming from, and offer what help I can. If my mom’s story, my story, my father’s story can help them, I offer it.
Even if I could never change the law, I would still protest, because it is a cause worth protesting. I am not focusing my entire attention on that side of things, as I believe I’ve demonstrated. I’m not exhausting myself on a lost cause. 40 Days for Life has succeeded in saving quite a number of children, given hope back to hopeless mothers and families, changed the hearts of clinic workers and abortionists, and has even had a hand in shutting down numerous clinics. All through simple prayer and a peaceful presence outside of these clinics, with smiling faces, open ears and arms, and directions to the nearest crisis pregnancy center. These people take classes in sidewalk counseling, and even help clinic workers to find new jobs when they express the interest in quitting.
I wasn’t suggesting that I needed your approval. That’s obvious enough that I don’t. But you posed the challenge that I don’t do anything, or enough. What would be enough for you? It seems to me that you’re of the opinion to just leave well enough alone. If so, then why be so disgusted with people who do just that, in your eyes, by doing nothing but praying and putting bumper stickers on their cars? Because they make a fuss? You seem awfully adamant yourself for someone who doesn’t want to impede on anyone’s free will.
