About 20 high school kids (including myself) from my school’s Live Action chapter went to a Planned Parenthood in the Bay Area.
We got there around 10:00 AM, and met with a few more activists with signs picturing abortion victims. We split up into a couple of groups of 7 or so each, and each group gathered in a circle near one of the 3 driveway entrances to the parking lot of the clinic. We prayed for a while, each sharing his/her own prayer, and then we read aloud from the Psalms. Then we prayed again. The whole time, children were being slaughtered, mercilessly, by abortionist doctors whose nurse friends had entangled the “patients” in a web of lies and deceit. Telling them that “Its not a baby…or anything like that.”
After praying, three of my friends and I began handing out information such as magazines on fetal development to the mothers coming into the clinic. We stood next to the driveways of the clinic, and when a car came by we would do our best to hand them the information. This we did with little success. In fact, one mother and her daughter, aged about 15, were driving out of the clinic parking lot. The young girl was sobbing, with her face buried in her hands. Her mother had her hand on her daughter’s shoulder, trying to comfort, only to fail. The hard, cold, reality was that their family had probably driven into that same parking lot a few hours before, with one more member of their family.
Now that member, boy or girl, was probably thrown carelessly away, but its spirit is in God’s hands.
This young girl was not the only one in that situation. Other women came out of the clinic, holding their stomachs and with expressions on their faces that said, “I regret it already.” and “don’t talk to me I am worthless.” and “what have I done?”. Not one–not one of these women came out of the clinic smiling.
Soon after that heartbroken girl had left the clinic, we were startled by some harsh words from a somewhat raised voice, a little ways behind us. Planned Parenthood “volunteers” had been patrolling the grounds with cameras, and if we set one foot across that invisible line which separated public property from Planned Parenthood property, they would whip out their cameras, hoping to get a picture of us so that they might file a report of tresspassing. Anyway, the speaking had come from an elderly man, who, despite Planned Parenthood’s attempts to keep him from engaging in conversation with us “anti-choice” people, had been arguing one of our group, Lila Rose. She had tried to ask him if he knew what abortion really was, and he was calling her names like “idiot”, “piece of crap”, and the like. He angrily slapped the magazines and her Bible out of her hands, and with the final comment of, “Its not a baby,” he turned around and walked away.
Meanwhile, another of our student groups was centered around a young man who was crying. They were praying for him, for his child, for the mother of his child, and for the “doctor” and all the others in the clinic. His child was, on that day, scheduled to be murdered.
He had tried to convince his girlfriend not to go through with the abortion, but she would not listen to him, and she went into the clinic anyway. He tried to follow her but the workers would not let him in. Since then, earlier in the morning, he had been either sitting outside the clinic, sobbing, or trying to get into the clinic, to save his child from those brutal instruments it was about to encounter. But there was nothing, nothing he could do. He was so close to his child, on those last hours, those last minutes of its life, but there was nothing he could do to save that one life that was so dear to him. So dear, even though he had never even seen his child. Now that is true love. That is the kind of love that needs to be shown by every mother, whether her son or daughter has been brought into the world yet or not. That is probably the closest that love on earth gets to the kind of unconditional love that God has for us.
I joined this group to pray for him. After we prayed, and he had gone off somewhere, probably to try to get into the building, we saw two women: one older and taller, the other younger and shorter. They walked over to our group, and told us that a man said to them as they were preparing to enter the clinic, ” You don’t want to go into that clinic.” The woman was not sure if she was pregnant. She said that she had once had an ectopic pregnancy, and she wanted to find out if she was pregnant and if the child was growing in the correct place this time. She had been going into Planned Parenthood for a pregnancy test.
So we offered to drive them to a Community Pregnancy Center (CPC) which is a pro-life organization that counsels women with unplanned pregnancies to consider putting their child up for adoption, or to keep their child: anything but kill it. But first, we all prayed for her together and then sent her with one of the dads in the group to the nearest CPC. If she had gone into the clinic, the “counselors” would have probably entangled her into that same web of lies that the first young girl we saw had probably been entangled in, and that so many women, looking for help, looking for support, find themselves entangled in.
While we were meeting all these people, we were passing out copies of Live Action’s magazine, The Advocate. I saw a young man of about 14 sitting at a bus stop. I was going to hand him a copy of the magazine, but I thought better of it and asked my brother to give him one instead, because I thought he would be more likely to listen to another boy his age than a girl. My brother sat down next to him and showed him the magazine. The boy asked, “What’s this?” to which my brother opened it up to a picture of a slaughtered child. about 10 weeks old. “That’s nasty…” the boy said. My brother then began explaining what it was, and that it was going on in the clinic behind them right at that time.
The boy looked startled, confused, sad, and my brother handed him a couple more copies of the magazine, advising him to give it to his friends, and if there was any girl he knew who was contemplating abortion, to show her that picture and advise her against it.
We saw suffering and pain that day. In that young girl’s life, in that unfortunate father’s life. In all those lives that we knew were being ended before they had a chance to thrive. We saw how much abortion hurts people. Not only in brutally killing babies, but also hurting both mothers and fathers emotionally and, sometimes, the mothers physically. We saw what it was like to be on so many different sides of the issue, to be the father, the mother, and the fortunate woman who makes that “choice” of life, to be an angry Planned Parenthood “escort”. We saw the young man on the bus stop, who doesn’t know what is going on. So many are ignorant. And so many are hurt.
How can these things happen? How have we let them continue to ravage our country?
“Let us be that generation that stood up, raised our voices, and finished the work.”
~Lila Rose (Live Action President, from her 2009 Life Prizes acceptance speech)
