Moral Outcry

I was one of thousands who gathered in Houston to take a stand in prayer against the Planned Parenthood abortion Super Center Jan. 18. The experience was awesome, encouraging, and sobering, all at once, but the one element that has not left me was a small one: the group of pro-abortion protesters who were barricaded by police directly across from where I spent the first two hours of the Siege.

I consciously listened to their protests as I prayed. Often shrouded in our Bible Belt bubble in Alabama, sometimes we get a honk of disgust or a random yell as we Siege, but we’ve certainly never been picketed (yet).

They said several vile things and called us many names. That was to be expected. They were angry, hateful, and seemed to enjoy blowing cigarette smoke at us while they displayed signs such as “I eat fetus sandwiches” and “Honor the Life of Dr. George Tiller: Abortion on Demand and without Apology.” A spokeswoman with a megaphone kept bellowing all the reasons they were right, which, as a teacher of rhetoric, I found a bit amusing. One minute they would chant “it’s not a baby till it comes out; that’s what birthdays are all about” and then the next they would ask us how we could force women to keep babies (which weren’t babies a minute ago). But in between the faulty fallacies of logic and angry words came something that struck me to the core:

“What are you going to do with all those babies?” yelled Megaphone. “Are you going to raise them?”

It was the only moment in the two hours of yelling I wanted to take off my tape and walk across the street.

“YES!” I wanted to say it emphatically and unequivocally. “Yes! We are going to raise them. We are going to adopt them and give them godly homes and let them be the person God ordained them to be from before their formation in the womb. (Jer. 1:5).

Aren’t we?

The fact is, at Bound4LIFE, that is the answer to that question. We don’t just pray to end abortion but to be the answer to abortion through adoption, whether by adopting ourselves or helping others to adopt.

Recently, at TheCall Crisis in Houston, a representative from Focus on the Family said “We have 300,000 churches in America, so why do we have orphans?” Now that was effective rhetoric.

We are committed to seeing abortion end in America, but what are we committed to do about it?

As we recently mourned a father in the Life and adoption movement, Derek Loux, I remembered starkly sitting in a seminar he taught that expanded my view of my fight to end abortion. He said that those who support abortion say things like “We aren’t ready, it’s not convenient, and we don’t have the money.” Then the church says, “Don’t kill your baby.” They respond, “Will you take him?” And the church says “We aren’t ready, it’s not convenient, and we don’t have the money.”

The church, Derek said, is not pro life, it’s anti abortion.

This is why the protesters in Houston resounded in me. Much of their reasoning was as off base as this rhetoric teacher has ever heard, but that question wasn’t. It was a valid question we have to answer. As I was pondering the protesters question this week and remembering Derek’s comment, my mind reflected to something Randy Bohlender of The Zoe Foundation said:

There is a great headache coming to the church as it realizes it has to read the Bible right. That it's not about small groups or mission statements or being relevant to culture, but that James may really have been inspired by the Holy Spirit when he said that true religion was caring for orphans and widows.  (Randy Bohlender, Nov. 2009)

It’s time for us to, literally, put our money (and time and life) where our mouth is.

We have a responsibility to be fully pro-life, not just anti-abortion.