Follow-up Report to Observers from Outside Our World

My encounters with people while protesting abortion

***BEGIN REPORT***

I assume that you received my last written report, and I am following up that one with this related one. After you have had time to review and digest their contents, I would be happy to have another conversation with you via your portal into my world. I hope you can give me a little warning next time before opening it up in my living room. I still find it a bit disconcerting to walk into the room expecting to see its usual furnishings only to find a blurry field of blue light emanating from a hole in the air. However, with a little warning, I’m better able to handle it. I do hope you can step through at some point, for I would like to see you in person, rather than looking at you through that portal. But I suppose it would be risky to do that. (Don’t even ask me to come over to your side—I’m not ready to even think about that just yet!)

Well, on with my report. In my last report, I explained that I was standing on the sidewalk in front of a building holding a sign and praying. My general reason was that I was there to assert the truth that all human life has value. In this report, I will explain more specifically why I was standing in front of that particular building and what happened while I was standing there.

First of all, the building that I was standing in front of is the local chapter of an organization called Planned Parenthood, whose guiding principle is about planning and managing human reproduction. This is a misnomer in that the vast majority of women who visit are not there to plan their pregnancies—they are there to end them. They are generally women in a crisis because they believe that the birth of a child will negatively impact their lives. Many sense that the fathers of their babies do not love them enough to stay with them and support their new child. Others are being pressured by men or their own families to get rid of a problem. These are the saddest cases of them all.

Planned Parenthood offers its services as an allegedly easy answer to this problem. Women are told that if they end their pregnancy, and if they believe that all that they have done is to remove an unwanted growth from their wombs, they can go back to their lives as if nothing has happened. This is an obvious lie. We often hear in social media that there are women who do not regret their abortions. These are women who have made themselves believe that they made the right decision in killing their unborn children. How long they will remain in this state of mind is a matter of mental effort and time. As they review their lives as they get older, will they never, ever have any regrets? Surely, they could not honestly say.

The mental walls that must be built to keep off that feeling of regret must be stupendous. Especially if they recall the details of the ending of their pregnancies. I’ve never witnessed this gruesome procedure in person (thank the Lord), but I’ve seen the results in the faces of women coming out of this building. I can see it all in a fleeting and passing glance. It wasn’t the easy answer they hoped for. The expected relief for a problem solved did not come. Instead, there’s a growing sense of guilt over what they have done, with the first sprouts spreading of a deepening sadness that replaces the problem they had with another, darker one. All this is in their faces as they pass in the passenger seats of cars driving away from this place. They often see me and my sign.

The sign I wear is a simple one, “Pray for the End of Abortion.” And that’s what I do when I’m standing in front of the building. By standing there, all we want is for people to see what we see. To awaken people to the reality that unborn children are being killed in the building behind me. It is not another medical building, like the urgent care a block down, nor the full hospital two blocks more after that. In those places, care is provided to treat people’s medical conditions and often to save lives. Not at Planned Parenthood. Lives are ended there, not saved.

The problem is that we are fighting a phenomenon known as “normalcy bias.” When people become used to something being in existence in their lives, even if it is an inherently evil thing, they eventually just accept it. You see, abortion was made legal across our country some 49 years ago. That recently changed, but abortion is still legal in many places. Most people do not really think about it, I assume, but most seem to believe that if a law is made that legalizes something, it must also be a moral thing to do. Ideally, that’s how it should be, but as you’ve seen throughout our history, our laws do not always correspond with good morality. An easy example of this in my own country is our old slavery laws. For the first ninety years of my country’s existence, one man could own another man and force that man to do labor for him without any just compensation. It was legal to do this in parts of the country, but it certainly wasn’t moral, and it took a civil war to stop this practice. Prior to that, a group known as abolitionists, some of them at least, took up arms and made attacks to end the practice of slavery. This did not end well for them (John Brown, in particular) as your review of history will attest. Some in my movement, the Pro-Life movement, have chosen this path of violence in the past. There were individuals who bombed abortion clinics and even killed abortionists, feeling that their acts were justified to save unborn children’s lives. The vast majority of others, like myself, have decided that peaceful protests and prayers are the only way to stop abortion. We are ultimately about changing people’s hearts. Killing abortionists and destroying buildings will not do that.

This is not to say that changing peoples’ hearts is a quick and easy process. My time in front of the building attests to this sad fact. In the years I have stood there (only an hour at a time in certain months of the year), I have not seen much progress. Most who pass by are generally apathetic. One frequent passerby was more concerned that I was not wearing a face mask (this was during our recent global freak-out over an illness called COVID-19) than what was happening behind me in the building. The neighborhood people (it’s a poor one) are mostly very nice and as often as not respond with smiles to my greetings. The hostility we get mostly comes from passing cars. Most are from young people who attend the local university, where they are taught that abortion is a good, a matter of women’s rights. As a result, these kids see us as the enemy of a good. We are no better than Nazis to them. (Yes, they see us as being as bad as those responsible for the deaths of millions of people—even as we are trying to save lives.) So, because of this, they feel that they are justified in wishing us evil and screeching bad words and making negative hand gestures at us as they pass by. Some have actually stopped in traffic, risking an accident, to tell us what they thought of us. One young fellow stopped his car and interrupted our prayer service to tell us we were not as smart as he was, and he knew that abortion was quite okay. Annoyed at his rudeness, I yelled at him to shut up and move on. You can’t talk to people like that.

When they yell at us, they don’t realize the impact it really has on us. One, it proves that we are hitting a nerve with some people. Two, we feel the honor that we can be hated for righteousness’ sake like our Lord Jesus Christ was before us. Three, we also know that it is a great evil to call an evil thing a good, and a good thing evil. We therefore pray for those people.

I actually do want to have a dialogue with people if possible. This has happened a few times. On one occasion, a couple of women were passing across the street, pushing a stroller with their kids. One of them called out something we could not hear very well as the traffic was particularly noisy at that moment. To our surprise, she then stepped out to cross the street to speak to us (the traffic had cleared up in the mean time). I was expecting her to be hostile, but she wasn’t. She wanted to explain to us that we were needlessly upsetting people by our presence. She explained that we all had our own truths and that basically we should allow everyone else to do their own thing that didn’t effect us. We might think it was wrong, but those visiting this building did not, so she concluded, basically, that we should mind our own business. I tried to suggest to her that there was such a thing as objective truth in the world, that for example, both of us—the pro-abortion and anti-abortion sides—could not both be right. Objective truth demanded that one of those sides was in the wrong. She would hear none of that. Hers was one of relativism, and this is indeed a deadening world-view we must fight against.

On another occasion, a young, college-aged couple passed me by on the sidewalk and then after they were about a half a block away the young man began yelling something about how we were trying to take away women’s rights. I called back that I was happy to discuss it with him rather than yelling in the street. To my surprise, they looked at each other and started back towards me, accepting my invitation. I cannot remember many specifics about our conversation, only that it actually went down in a cordial fashion. I observed but tried not to stare at the young man’s chest. Rather than a typical shirt that human males usually wear, he had on a halter top normally used by females to cover their breasts. They identified themselves as “vegans,” a movement, you might have noted, who feel ethically that they cannot eat meat products because it kills animals in the process. You would think that someone who deplored the killing of animals would also extend this way of thinking towards unborn humans. These two did not. Their general line of rebuke to me was that pro-lifers were trying to control women. To which I responded that I had no desire to control women, only that I wanted us all to recognize the truth that all human life was valuable, including the unborn. If I only wanted to control women, I suggested, I could easily find better ways of doing that than wasting my time standing on a sidewalk praying and holding a sign. From their reaction to my words, I believed that this was likely the first time they had ever heard the pro-life position explained to them. I didn’t ask but quickly concluded that they must have been college students. No one else could be that mixed up about life—certainly not the working poor living in that neighborhood.

Yet another occasion for conversation was not as close and personal, unfortunately. As I was praying and pacing, I noticed that a man was passing by on the other side of the street. He looked as if he were on his way back from the grocery store as he had a shopping bag in his hand. He halted and began shouting at me from across the street—it’s a four-lane road, so we had some distance between us. He shouted out a familiar objection to ending the practice of abortion by asking me if I would stop a girl who had been raped and impregnated from going into the building behind me to get an abortion. I replied without hesitation that there are no exceptions—all human life is valuable, even the child of a rapist. I said that the penalty for rape should be paid for by the rapist, not the innocent child. My verbal opponent then upped the ante by claiming that his own 13-year-old daughter had just been raped, and was still in the hospital because of it. I responded with honest, heart-felt sorrow and horror, that this was a terrible evil and that she would be in my prayers. “And you would not allow her to take care of it if she got pregnant,” he cried, attempting to rebuke me. I replied as compassionately as I could. “Again, what happened to your daughter was an evil, horrible thing. But having an abortion will not take away the evil done to her; you would only be responding to an evil with more evil if you had her get an abortion. You would be punishing and killing an innocent child, not the rapist,” I added. “So you would force my child to have a rapist’s baby, that’s what your saying. If you could only hear yourself speaking,” he cried. I answered because I felt I must, saying, “And you are saying you would be fine with killing your own potential grandchild. Can you hear what you are saying to me?” He waved his arm in disgust as if to push it all away from him and continued on his way. I did not make my last statement in order to win the argument. I wanted him to wake up. I wanted him to realize what he was actually arguing for. I was not sure if he was lying to me about his daughter, so I prayed for them both. It was the charitable thing to do.

I was on the sidewalk again a few times after that encounter, but did not see the man again. I hope and pray that he and his daughter heal from a horrible thing done to them. But, as I was trying to explain to the man, because an evil thing happens, we can never perform another evil act in an attempt to make it better. This only breeds more evil. It certainly does not change the fact that all human life is valuable.

So, to conclude, abortion is a horrible, on-going evil in our world. Some of us are trying to fight it through peaceful protest and prayer. And I should mention that the Pro-Life movement has many ministries available to help women who find themselves in crisis pregnancies and also for those who feel regret for having abortions. I would be happy to expand upon all these things in a future report. I’m sure that I do not do enough, but until this building is vacant and the killing ends, I intend to keep standing in front of it and praying for an end to abortion.

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