an every day emergency

Unless they're lying to me (which, sadly, I've learned I shouldn't put past them), the Planned Parenthood at 3255 E. Main Street performs abortions on Wednesdays and Fridays. So yesterday, I pulled up to park along a side street* and pray in front of their building- and immediately noticed a police cruiser parked in the alley behind.

Some abortion mills hire police to be there all day, every day, barricading their fortress of death in what appears to be a kind of unholy alliance. But I had never seen a police at this Main Street location before; and largely due to the fact that Planned Parenthoods, including this one, are purposely (and, arguably, discriminatorily) located in poor areas with high crime rates, I wondered: Did something just happen here? Is it safe to be here alone?

I readily admit, I say a quick prayer for my own safety any day I go to pray at an abortion clinic for a few reasons: 1) they're typically in bad areas, 2) I'm a young woman, 3) I'm doing something public and controversial, and 4) even the most peaceful pro-lifers have been assaulted before. The combination makes me feel a bit vulnerable, to say the least. So yesterday, still sitting in my parked car, I called my boyfriend Tommy to see if he could either join me or offer me some advice. Our conversation went something like this:

Me: "Hey, are you free to come pray with me at the Planned Parenthood near Bexley? There's a police here and I'm wondering if it's safe."

Tommy: "I wish I could, but I'm about to go help my Uncle Frank move boxes to his new house. I'm sorry."

Me: "That's okay. Any idea why there might be a police?"

Tommy: "I don't know... (Pause) Someone probably died there."

His response took me by surprise, but my heart immediately dropped because he was right; he wasn't trying to make a joke or be sarcastic. Of course, I don't think Tommy really thought the police cruiser was there for that reason, and I hardly imagined it was, either; but he was trying to make a point. People die at abortion clinics. Someone probably did die there that morning. In fact, if all went according to plan, more than one someone probably did. The truth was, multiple people were scheduled to die at the Bexley Planned Parenthood on the morning of Friday, May 28, 2010. That's why I had come there in the first place.

Needless to say, I decided to stay and pray. I tried, pretty unsuccessfully, to remain prayerful as a few honking cars drove by and a clinic worker came outside to smoke a cigarette. I smiled at her genuinely. She didn't smile back. Meanwhile, a woman and young girl, possibly a mother and daughter, walked out the doors and towards their car. The girl looked like she had been crying. I wondered what had happened. But if these small distractions weren't enough to divert me from prayer, I was definitely distracted by the time a loud siren began to squeal. A Columbus Fire Department station is located right across the street from Planned Parenthood, and it seemed an emergency was transpiring.

My thoughts began to wander as I switched my prayer (or, by that point, lack thereof) from one for the women and children inside the clinic to one for the person or persons on the other end of that ambulance route. I thought, "The worst that could happen is someone will die. The squad will not get there fast enough, or the injury will be fatal, or the heart attack will be too severe, and they will not make it." I prayed, "Please, God, don't let that happen."** As I stood there with my imagination running rampant, death seemed like this horrible, heart-wrenching, worst-case scenario. It was the most tragic outcome I could think of.

And then it occurred to me that for millions of unborn children in America, death was not the worst-case scenario or the most tragic outcome; it was the status quo.

If a baby is "expelled" from her mother after an abortion and comes out alive, the procedure is labeled a botched abortion. In other words, the abortion failed. The goal was to kill the infant, and here we have this screaming, kicking little girl, and we're terribly upset and at a loss for what to do. An abortionist's job is to dismember, suffocate, or burn with saline solution an unborn child to the point where she is definitively killed. That's what he gets paid for; that's when he has succeeded. If the child comes out any way other than dead and cold, the abortionist blew his mission that day.

My thoughts had me heavy-hearted. I became increasingly horrified at the reality that tiny human beings just 30 feet away were suffering their status quo: enduring their violent death. Anyone who has ever seen a picture of an aborted fetus knows that abortion is violence. It is undeniable; it is so obvious.

I left the clinic yesterday morning with an army of emotions, but mostly anger. Our nation's highest Court made abortion-on-demand an elaborately protected right, and because of that, no one was there to help those vulnerable children dying at 3255 E. Main Street. If I felt vulnerable being there, I wondered how they must have felt as they watched a suction tube or scalpel enter their previously placid home and felt their limbs and body thrashing around. At least if something happened to me, someone would call 911. Someone would come to my aid. But the unborn children in that Planned Parenthood had no emergency squad coming to their rescue yesterday. No one was rushing their bloodied bodies to the hospital to be treated and spared. Nobody cared. The reality was, the ambulance I had just seen thirty minutes before would never even have thought to come to that clinic***. I had watched it pass right by, leaving those children alone to die their scheduled deaths without any concern at all.

If we, as Christians, do not go to these death camps to pray and testify to life, we are little better than the people committing the killings inside. I'm not saying I go as often as I should, or even nearly as often as I should; we should all be convicted to do more. But the fact that innocent human beings, fearfully and wonderfully made by God, are lined up to die there week after week should be reason enough for each of us to leave the comfort of our homes, of our safe neighborhoods, of our political correctedness, and, at the very least, be with them at their hour of death.

Police and paramedics aren't going to do it for us.

Vita Pro Omni!

* Pro-lifers, you may already know this, but always be sure to park elsewhere if you are praying or picketing at an abortion clinic. Do not step onto their property. Stand on the sidewalk, in a location highly visible to people entering the clinic, to people already inside, and to cars driving by. More than the fact that you could technically be arrested for trespassing on clinic property, we want to be as polite and pleasant as possible in our interactions with abortionists and clinic workers. We will never win this battle through expressions of aggression or anger; even if we could, we shouldn't.

** Of course, followed by, "But, Your will be done." Gotta pray that part even when I don't want to. :)

*** Even though within its walls emergencies are habitual and premeditated.