Toronto March for Life(posted previously)
I am part of a Facebook group where people from my community can post anonymously to get advice from other people without anyone knowing who it is that’s asking. Recently, someone posted on the group that she had just found out that her pre-born child might be born with Down’s Syndrome. She had just found out and did not know what to do. She felt disqualified to care for a child with a disability, and she also felt that if the child was indeed born with a disability, her child would have a lower quality of life than it deserved.
Feeling like it was the only solution, the woman asked if there was anywhere she could go to obtain a late-term abortion. This mother sounded distraught, and begged that people not bash her as she was “going through enough.” And that’s when the bashing began.
Of course, of the many people that responded to her post, not everyone jumped onto the bash bandwagon. People who knew someone with Down’s Syndrome posted testimonies of how beautiful and enriching these children are to the lives of people around them. People who support abortion through all stages of development and for any reason (or no reason) cheered her on in her choice to abort and offered her the information she had requested. Mothers who had received similar tidings about their children posted stories of how the doctors were wrong and their children were completely healthy and “normal.” Many women offered to adopt her baby or help her through this difficult journey if she would just carry through with the pregnancy and give birth to her precious baby.
But the reason I’m incited to write this article is because of all the people who call themselves pro-life who decided to call this woman all kinds of names, to tell her that she is selfish, to tell her she doesn’t deserve children, even telling her that she herself should have been aborted. How do we think that any of that is going to change her mind? Instead, she chose to stop reading the comments because of how mean so many of them were, and we lost the chance to connect with her, to potentially help her.
How does anyone think that bashing a desperate woman is going to make her want to side with you? Calling her ignorant and uneducated and even worse things is only going to make her run in the other direction and cling to the people who sound like they’re being helpful and loving. I agree that we cannot hide the truth from her, because love without truth isn’t love at all. That’s the reason we use pictures in our conversations about abortion, since they so clearly show the truth about abortion. But on the other hand, truth without love is ineffective.
If we call ourselves pro-life, we should want to be as effective as possible and save as many lives as possible. Being mean and heartless to women who find themselves in desperate situations is not how we are going to do that. In fact, it will probably do the exact opposite, and the blood of those children will be on our hands.
Not only do I hope and pray that this woman does not choose abortion for her pre-born child, but I hope and pray that instead of focusing on all the cruel comments directed at her by alleged pro-lifers, she sees the love and concern in the comments by those who truly want to help her and her baby.
