One of my favorite times of the day is logging onto Facebook, to see what my friends are up to.
I find some friends have posted photos...others have joined groups ranging from UK Beekeepers to Evangelium Vitae...others have become fans of Mother Teresa or Ronald Reagan...and still others are giving status reports on what they did this past weekend.
I love looking at all the different Facebook pictures. One friend has a picture which shows off her artistic talent...another posted a photo which shows off her muscles as a bodybuilder...another posted a profile picture that shows she looks almost just like she did at our high school graduation.
My friends on Facebook are all different ages--some I went to school with, others I know from work. It's amazing to see what they've done with their lives--one channeled her love for entertainment into a career as a talent scout...another tapped into her love for reading to become a reference librarian. I received an e-mail from one Facebook friend who reminded me of how I had cast her as Annie Oakley in a sixth-grade spoof of Hollywood movies.
The Facebook phenomenon reached a milestone last year, when it was reported that it had welcomed its 30 millionth subscriber. Thirty-million people, finding friends, making friends, being friends. It’s been estimated that the Internet’s social networking community may reach one billion in 2009, meaning that, increasingly, people are finding it as important to plug in as to phone home.
Just today, though, it occurred to me that a friend is missing on my Facebook page. That's the friend who wasn't allowed to be born because of abortion.
I know it's worse for Generation Y--one-fourth of their generation has been wiped out by abortion. It's more than 36,000 faces in my state of Pennsylvania, 1.2 million faces nationwide each year...50 million in the U.S. since 1973, when Roe v. Wade was decided. In other words, if all those aborted babies had had a chance to live, Facebook would be more than double its size.
As a result of abortion, we have lost family members, friends, and connections. There are millions of relationships, both online and offline, that simply don’t exist because we’ve been systematically eliminating part of our population. The greatest nation in the world has been impoverished by that compassion deficit that abortion creates.
The next time you sign onto Facebook, MySpace, or another social networking site, why not say a little prayer for the families of those on the missing list? Their lives did matter, and they should be remembered, if only for those precious seconds when you're typing in your password.