Why I Made a (Small) Year-End Gift to a Crisis Pregnancy Center, and You Should Consider Doing Something Similar

This is heart-wrenching. So be prepared. You may have heard something about this story, but the firsthand account is especially moving.

From the January 2010 issue of First Things, page 70 in Joseph Bottum’s “While We’re At It.” The comments at the end are mine.

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It’s hard to keep up the illusion of abortion as a positive good when the ugly reality of it is always lurking just behind the abstract idea. The wall of illusion came crashing down for Abby Johnson when, after working for Planned Parenthood in Texas for eight years, she witnessed an actual abortion on ultrasound. In a television interview, she explained, “It was actually an ultrasound-guided abortion procedure. . . . Any my job was to hold the ultrasound probe on this woman’s abdomen so that the physician could actually see the uterus on the ultrasound screen. And when I looked at the screen, I saw a baby. . . . I saw a full side profile. So I saw face to feet. . . . I saw the probe going into the woman’s uterus. And at that moment, I saw the baby moving and trying to get away from the probe. . . . And I thought, “It’s fighting for its life. . . . It’s life, I mean, it’s alive.”

After some additional questions, Johnson went on to say: “And then, all of a sudden, I mean, it was just over. . . . And I just saw the, I just saw the baby just literally, just crumble, and it was over. . . . I was thinking about my daughter, who’s three, and I was thinking about the ultrasound I had of her, and I was thinking of just how perfect that ultrasound was when she was twelve weeks in the womb. And I was just thinking, “What am I thinking, ‘What am I doing?’. . . . I had one one hand on this woman’s belly, and I was thinking, ‘There was life in here, and now there’s not.'”

And that was it. Any illusion Johnson had about what abortion really is was over. She quit her job and began working with the pro-life organization that protested at her former clinic.

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Abortion is not just one issue among many. We are not just arguing about different means to a shared end. We are arguing about the “right,” pulled out of constitutional thin air, to end a life. Abortion is the deepest social injustice because the human is helpless and innocent. It is the gravest tragedy because the procedure Abby Johnson describes is purposefully lethal and perfectly legal.

Lord, haste the day when the collective ignominy our nation feels toward slavery and racism will be felt concerning this evil as well.

And until that day, let every Christian light a candle and curse the darkness that makes its flame necessary.