Stones and More Stones

Mollie Zeigler has some profound insights at Get Religion on postabortion effects in women.

The Feb 2006 issue of Touchstone journal ran a piece on abortion clinics, “A Stone for Shmuel,” by William Luse. In it Luse wrote in response to an abortion article he read in Glamour magazine. He reports that according to the Glamour article, many in clinics have become a “kinder, gentler sort of baby-killing clinic.” One he names even has a wall in its “inner waiting room” lined with pink hearts. On these hearts mothers of aborted babies have left messages.

Examples are:

“You’ll always be a part of me even though you are not here with me. All my love, the Mom you’ll never meet but I’m sure you know who I am.”

“Even if it doesn’t feel right doesn’t mean it’s wrong.”

“This has got to be the hardest decision I’ve ever had to make… You will always be my baby. I will see you in heaven.”

Luse writes, “Not to coach the reader too closely, but here is the religious impulse in the devil’s service. These ladies have re-ordered their reason, to much rejoicing in hell.”

Luse also reports that the pre-abortion interview questions have been re-framed “with the justification built in.”

“Do you feel it’s OK to kill a fetus for your own life?”

“Does being a good mother sometimes mean acknowledging that I can’t be a mother right now?”

“Can you see abortion as a loving act toward your children and yourself?”

It would seem, considering what Luse reports in light of the Glamour magazine article, women have been coached to believe that abortion is the right thing to do. They are also pre-conditioned for a certain reaction to the abortion. Gene Veith reported in World Magazine during the last election that the amazing paradox of the abortion debate now is that

pro-lifers may be winning the debate on when life begins, but for an increasing number of people it doesn’t matter. Polls show that nearly half of all Americans agree that life begins at conception. And yet, as many as two-thirds of Americans believe abortion should be legal through the first three months. A large percentage of the public, like Sen. Kerry, believes that a fetus is a living human being, and yet can be aborted anyway. Forty-eight percent go so far as to say they believe that abortion is murder. And yet, many of the same people believe that such murder should be legal!

It is bad enough to believe in abortion under the assumption that a fetus is not a human life. But to believe that a fetus is a human being and still to believe in abortion is monstrous.

Pink heart messages from abortive mothers to aborted babies demonstrate how true this is. According to feminism a moral test is the effect of an ethical position, moral decision, or policy on the actual lives of women. This mantra is ingrained in the American social and political worldview. It is also a part of many religious systems.

What the messages on the pink hearts themselves bespeak are women who know they will mourn both the fact of a dead child and the act of a mother killing her own child. One clinic assuages the vacuum left by the abortion with a brightly colored rock. How deadly ironic this is when one considers that the Rock these women needs even before abortion is considered is Christ!

Luse concludes:

“All I know is that hell has a home on earth. If we can just come up with the right perspective, find the right name for it, call it by what we want it to be rather than what it is, we can live there quite comfortably. If we ‘examine’ our religion long and hard enough, we can lose it or remake it in our own image.

“You’d think we could face the facts, the reality, seeing how we keep on dying. Maybe we don’t face it because, in the wondrous inversion peculiar to our times, we no longer die to ourselves but are in love with them; no longer die to love but are in love with death. I don’t understand it, can’t explain it, and I’m sure as hell not going to give it a name, for the one reality I’d like not to face is the one requiring us to give the devil his due.”

For even more good reading on the effect abortion has on lives see January 21, 2006, World Magazine, see What Women Want.