The Face of Abortion

At the March for Life, Washington D.C., 1.24.11

Her name was Janet. * I haven’t seen her in nearly 40 years but I remember her exactly as she looked in the Hardscrabble, our high school yearbook: hair the color of cornstalks and eyes like the Illinois sky on a hot summer day. A pale, pretty girl. A good student but not great. A really nice girl, my friend Janet.

She called one night a few months before we were due to graduate and said she had something to tell me, something she couldn’t talk to anyone about. Could she come over?

15 minutes later tires crunched on the gravel outside our farmhouse.  Streator was 11 miles away and Janet lived on the far side of town – how did she get there so quickly?

Up in my bedroom we sat cross-legged and I looked at her anxiously. Jan’s eyes were rimmed with red, and she buried her face in her hands as her body began to rock. In between sobs she choked out a few words. Pregnant. The older, controlling boyfriend none of us ever liked. Abortion. He forced her to go. She was afraid of what he would do to her if she refused. It was already over. Her baby was dead.

 And Jan was dying inside.

I don’t know what I said but it was too little, too late. I wrapped my arms around her shaking shoulders and prayed. We were just two 17-year-olds – one who had never had a boyfriend and one whose first and only love had pressured her to have sex and then end the life of the child who was conceived.

Abortion. The word was ugly then and the 1972 law legalizing it has only made it fouler.

Yesterday afternoon I stood on the National Mall in Washington, D.C in honor of the 38^th annual March for Life – a middle-aged woman in a gray parka holding a large black sign with four simple words.  In a crowd estimated at over 200,000 I was one small drop in an ocean of humanity. The people swelling around me could not have been more diverse. Jewish rabbis and Franciscan brothers. Catholic nuns and young mothers. Families pushing their children in strollers and the disabled in wheelchairs.

And students. Tens of thousands  of high school and college students who poured out of buses in a tidal wave of joyful, peace-filled, life-loving protest. “We are the Pro-Life Generation,” their signs read.

“We are Abortion Abolitionists.”

“Social Justice Begins in the Womb.” 

These kids are going to change history, I thought incredulously.  They understand how sacred life is, and no one is going to convince them otherwise. And as I walked in their midst towards the Supreme Court, I gripped my own sign a little tighter and held it just a little higher as I thought of the 50 million people who have had their lives ended since 1972 in the way Jan’s child did.

“Women DO Regret Abortion,” my sign said.

Jan, I did it for you.

*name has been changed

I’m Gonna Get to That

The national holiday for procrastinators, and I missed it

It’s the first month of the first year of the second decade of the new millennium but resolutions are so, you know, 2010.

I  thought about making my list on New Year’s Day but I never got around to it. Not that I didn’t have plenty of promises to populate that list:

• Lose that extra 10 (be honest now!) OK, 15 (alright already!) 20 pounds.
• Read through the Bible this year (All the way through – no fair whining that I don’t understand Leviticus.)
• Get back to the gym at least 3 times a week (So I’m busy, big deal. Who isn’t?)
• Do CPR on the household clutter (Consider, Purge, Redistribute). Out with the old!

So why haven’t I started on any of the above except the Bible reading (spiritual, aren’t I?)

Because my biggest resolution is to stop procrastinating, and then I’ll tackle the other stuff.

I’m gonna get to them, really.

Procrastination, says my friend Beth, is insecurity raised to an art form. This was a new insight. Me, insecure? Well, DUH. So why do people like me who are prone to self-doubt procrastinate? Because we don’t want to tackle a job until we think we can do it perfectly (as if perfection were actually achievable.)

And we put things off because getting rid of clutter, for instance, involves being decisive, and we hate decisions (unless they involve chocolate).

Besides which we are sometimes lazy and slothful, and that is one of the Seven Deadly Sins, and making the Seven Deadly Sins List is bad even when you’re trying hard not to break the Big Ten.

So my resolution for 2011 is to STOP PROCRASTINATING, for Pete’s sake (who is Pete, anyway? I intend to look that up.)

Later.

Notes from Norfolk: A Publicist’s Problem with Pain

What a difference a month can make….sometimes.

Exactly four weeks ago at this very unhistoric moment, an unassuming Christian girl with over five decades of life experience was trying a new one: allowing a small doctor with a big knife to carve his initials (and who knows what else) into her left shoulder. She works as a book publicist and prefers to put a positive spin on practically everything. So she thought (see? assumptions after all!) that lolling around in Same Day Surgeryland would be, you see, a bit of a holiday and she’d be back at work some 36 hours later madly typing away.

Well she’s mad alright, but not at the ortho guy who was simply doing his job as he was very well paid to do. She’s sore too, and not just from the shoulder slaughter. She tripped, as it happened, over her own Big Fat Assumption that SDS would not disrupt her carefully plotted out little life one bit. That the page would turn on the pain the very next day and she would be back to zippering her own frocks and curling her bottle-blond tendrils using both arms.

So here she sits one month later at an airport in the freezing Southeast, waiting for a flight to Chicago that just might never leave because, quite frankly, it doesn’t want to go there, and pain has lit a match to the gasoline that the surgeon dutifully substituted for blood in her veins.

Now if this assumption-tripping publicist were actually a successful author like the ones she works for, she would find Some Deep Meaning in the pain, as if it were unique to her own small life. As if millions of people all over the world don’t live in chronic pain every day of every decade.

But she can’t, you see, because to assume little Mrs. Publicist shouldn’t suffer a bit would be the height of western-style arrogance. The question is not why-does-this-hurt-so-badly but rather why- has- she- been- so- blessed that she has lived a relatively pain- free life up till now? (She does recall quite vividly some wild-eyed hollering on three memorable days in the 80’s, but oh the spectacular payoff when she was sent home with a small prize package each time.)

So instead of reaching for the Vicodin on this particular snowbound evening in Norfolk, she sips hot chocolate at an airport Starbucks and leverages her pain into prayer. Prayers for the friends with troubled children. Pleas for the cancer-wracked and the brutally bereaved. Intercession for the mentally unsteady and their suffering families.

 Her own pesky discomfort reminds the publicist that there is more to life, much more, that how she feels at this particular moment.  That suffering, a little or a lot, is the way of this world. That the God who made her did not pour the gasoline nor did He light the match. He has provided instead a very different kind of Light, one that peeks, and occasionally pours, through the cracks in her fragile, cracked-pot life.

The Publicist will continue to trip over her silly assumptions in the years to come as she stumbles and bumbles her way to her final destination, but there’s a light that is guiding her way. Though she can’t see it yet, she knows it’s there.

And on this snowy evening in Norfolk, Virginia, that’s good enough for her.