A young woman named Lila Rose was on God TV recently, addressing what looked like a church conference in Sweden. I happened upon the programme late one evening while trying to wind down from a marathon work session. There was nothing new in the things she was speaking about. Most people have heard the arguments she put forward, and we all have an opinion about the topic. Moreover, many of us know someone who has done “it” at least once.
That’s how common abortion is.
As is often the way with common yet consequential things, somehow abortion has become just another word. Like air. Water. Divorce. Grass.
Abortion just doesn’t seem like that big a deal.
But for some reason, this programme gripped me for a good hour, in spite of how late it aired. Listening to Lila Rose discuss the thorny topic in simple, plain and bold terms brought starkly to the fore, a new meaning of the scripture we so glibly recite: “My people are destroyed for lack of KNOWLEDGE” (Hosea 4:6 NKJV).
The broadcast was an exposition of Lila’s work with Live Action, the pro-life organization she founded and runs. As it progressed, I realized that although the age-old remedy for “undoing” an “oops!” pregnancy is a much-discussed topic, very few people actually KNOW what an abortion entails in real terms.
Experiential knowledge is the crux of the matter.
Consider this example: we’ve all been guilty of gushing about the splendour of a place we’ve merely heard of, or watched travel programmes about on TV. But the experience of going there and experiencing it in real life gives us a completely new perspective.
In the same way, we could argue for hours in defence of a woman’s prerogative to decide what she can or cannot do with her body based on theories and second-hand convictions; and it would seem that throughout the world the tide of opinion is turning towards wholesale condoning of such a right. But when it comes down to the crunch and we have all the facts at our disposal, our opinions won’t be quite so airtight.
Lila Rose got me digging into the issue, leading me to watch some internet footage in which interviewees were initially very vocal in their pro-abortion views. On watching videos showing actual abortion procedures, these same interviewees radically changed their previous opinions on abortion within the few seconds it took to watch the contents.
Rights
The current generation of young people has been bred to constantly demand for their “rights”. This makes them easy prey for those pursuing an agenda of convenience and has led to the mass murder of millions through abortion.
Let’s examine the nature of an abortion.
For starters, it is always a secret. It’s not something anyone would put on the personal info section of their résumé. The fact that abortion is obviously something we instinctively know not to broadcast should be enough reason to cause alarm bells to ring. My mother once told me that anything one does while hiding, is wrong. This is a simple but true guideline for life.
Secondly, a medical intervention that is performed when there is no medical problem is really impossible to justify. Abortion is certainly not a benign surgical procedure. It is, in essence, elective surgery which is not life-saving.
There are countless, seemingly valid, reasons for a woman to procure an abortion: “I can’t afford another child” or “I got pregnant by accident” or “I couldn’t bear to embarrass my parents”. But there must equally be a multitude of solutions for an unwanted pregnancy that don’t have to involve a dangerous medical procedure for the mother and a fatal outcome for the child.
Underlying the arguments in favour of abortion is the misconception that the pregnancy is “just a clump of bloody tissue”. This dehumanization of the baby in utero has led to large-scale deception, especially among young girls who are still unschooled about their own anatomy, let alone the anatomy of a pregnancy.
Desperate
Many women procure abortions when they feel overwhelmed and desperate. What they don’t know while they are in the midst of intense anguish and shame, is that having an abortion will definitely not fix the situation they are in. It is not, as their ears so desperately want to hear, “just a simple procedure”. It cannot turn back time. It will not magically transport you back to your pre-pregnancy past.
Abortion presents its own problems – physical, emotional and psychological. Often, the trauma resulting from the abortion is much worse and far longer-lasting than what the pregnancy caused the woman to experience. Touted as a routine, insignificant medical procedure, abortion often turns out to be life-changing in all the wrong ways. Women who seek help through post-abortion counselling have to go through debriefing by way of humanizing the child by naming him/her and seeking forgiveness for cutting short his or her life.
The psychological and emotional effects of an abortion are complex. Women suffer through unexpressed grief simply because of the ambiguity of the experience. Usually, grief is defined as the powerful emotions one feels in response to a traumatizing event or situation that is outside of one’s control. Just how does one grieve over a decision they made themselves?
Having an abortion doesn’t even save relationships, like so many couples believe. In reality, an abortion often creates relational problems that didn’t exist before by introducing guilt, anger and depression because now, you both participated in killing someone – and not just anyone, but your own child.
In the 2006 book Make Me Your Choice by Cheryl Chew, the author says:
“People think that having an abortion is a quick fix, a mend-all for an accident or a bad mistake. Some will reason that nobody will know about it, and nobody will see the awful thing we did… Abortion does hurt. It always carries severe consequences with it. Abortion not only kills the little baby, but it affects and even destroys all life around it. I know, for it destroyed my marriage and relationship with my family and relatives and put me under a bondage of unworthiness, depression, guilt, shame, and self-condemnation for more than 20 years.”
The secret place
The moment fertilization occurs is the one concession I am willing to make that the “big bang” theory holds any water. The sudden existence of a new life where before there was none, has got to be the biggest miraculous phenomenon of all time.
Now, consider what it means to be the one aborted.
Every baby – yourself included – begins life as a hidden being, an invisible person with no power to protect himself or herself in the secret place that is the womb of a woman. Powerful work is going on in that hidden place; divine work that no human hand can replicate despite our best efforts. The life force remains a mystery that confounds the most accomplished of scientists.
Snuffing out life, whether it be the life of an ant or an elephant, always changes something inside the one who does it.
While we must feel compassion for women caught in the dilemma of an unwanted pregnancy, we must equally be the voice of the unseen preborn person, that one who because of a short time interval, is not considered our senses-driven world to be worth too much. Because we can’t see, touch or feel him or her, we don’t think he or she could actually be a real person yet.
***
This wasn’t easy to write. It took months. Abortion is a super-sensitive issue.
I had to brace myself to watch the videos in the link below, in order to craft this from a place of truth. I only managed to do so several weeks from the day the programme featuring Lila Rose aired. As I watched, my stomach was queasy as the animated images of tiny, dismembered body parts came into view as I forced my eyes to take in the video. Even afterwards, the horrific memory had me shuddering.
But I had to do this. It’s one of those things that won’t go away.
You just can’t turn back time.
That’s the biggest lie of all.
Love and blessings,
Joy
Joy on the Journey 
Is there really anything to say in response to this?
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