By Dave Andrusko
Ellie Saul is a gifted writer, some of whose postings at bound4life.org she has happily allowed us to reprint. (To cite two examples, nrlc.cc/YmXwZa and nrlc.cc/WztKEc.)
I find her a delight for many reasons but first and foremost because her writings are bathed in a passionate concern for the unborn, the outpouring of a gentle spirit.
If you’ve been in this Movement as long as people like me have, there is always the danger that at some level you lose your edge of moral indignation. It wouldn’t be accurate to say you become inured to the suffering of unborn children and the aftershocks so many women experience, or that you tacitly “accept” that abortion will be legal for a long, long time.
But you can (and I am speaking as a warning to myself here) become less furious at the inhumanity of abortion or less indignant that 56 million individual unborn babies have died since Roe in the United States.
Note, please, I did not say angry. I said indignant and furious.
Indignant in the sense that abortion is a rip in the moral fabric that must be mended—that abortion is unworthy of us, a nation conceived in liberty–a mockery of all that we purport to stand for.
I understand furious can be taken as just another way of saying very angry. That’s not what I mean.
For me, to be furious about abortion is to driven by a recognition that I may not have done everything I could have to help a young girl or woman find a peaceful, loving “win-win” solution. That my vision too often is straight ahead—that I lack the peripheral vision (or choose not to exercise it) to gaze on either side where desperate women would be seen hurting. In other words, furious not at others but at me.
When Mrs. Saul posted “Valley of Weeping,” it reminded me that I need my heart pierced on a regular basis.
And that my prayer list must have room to add the unnamed women contemplating an abortion, convinced that the death of their children is their “only way out.”
And that in every way I become the kind of approachable human being who can be turned to when these life-and-death decisions hang in the balance.
For if not me, who? If not us, who?