The Road We've Taken

"Lord, help all of us as parents realize that we are honoroed to care for the little children You put into our lives."

From Letters to Gabriel, by Karen Garver Santorum

"Results from the [Dr. Diane] Meier survey suggested if physician- assisted suicide was legalized, many more doctors would be willing to engage in it."

Reuters, April 22

"[Compassion is] the recognition that other people's problems, their pain and frustrations, are every bit as real as our own - - often far worse. In recognizing this fact and trying to offer some assistance, we open our own hearts and greatly enhance our sense of gratitude."

From Don't Sweat the Small Stuff... and It's All Small Stuff, by Richard Carlson, Ph.D.

In one sense the pro-life movement's struggle is ultimately not with those physicians who pervert their extraordinary skills nor with principle-free cynics like Bill Clinton nor even with abortion profiteers such as Planned Parenthood. All of these must, of course, be confronted, resisted, and - - we can pray - - converted to the cause of life. But there is something that precedes the involvement of the abortion maximizers: the addiction to first-resort use of lethal violence when a crisis occurs.

It was a given that Roe would greatly increase the likelihood that the first-instinct response to an unplanned pregnancy would be brutality. Equally predictable was that it would also become the "solution of choice" for dealing with other helpless people. On the surface, killing people (oh, excuse me, "terminating potential life" and "self-deliverance") has a ring of finality about it, a quick strike, glad-that's-over-with quality that has enormous appeal when times are exceedingly demanding. To a delusional nation bathed in violence, it's become a would-be panacea, the path of least resistance. For 25 years, character and commitment have become, for too many, the road not taken.

What's fascinating is how people process the violence that is abortion. A distinction once made by historian Daniel Boorstin, between illiteracy and alliteracy, is helpful. A certain percentage of people looking at abortion simply lack the emotional, intellectual, or moral skills to "read" brutality and violence. They are, if you will, the illiterates. Others are like Boorstin's alliterates who (in his example) could read the instructions on the medicine bottle but deliberately chose not to. Such people have the equipment to see abortion's monstrous face but have consciously made the decision not to. Because of something that happened this very morning, I see more clearly how enthusiastically our culture has lowered its caution flags. This very personal experience will be as difficult for you to read as it is for me to write but stay with me for there is an important lesson.

I awoke early as I always do to help my daughter with her paper route. Bowl of cereal in hand, I went downstairs and flipped on the television before awakening Joanna. This is something I haven't done this time of day in I don't know how long, but our schedule is so hectic nowadays we need to use every second.

Our church is about to engage in a difficult undertaking: a capital campaign to raise the money to construct an additional building to better serve middle high youth, the elderly, and minorities. That night my wife, Lisa, and I were to host a meeting at which members of the congregation would watch a video on the importance of sacrificial giving. I needed to run through it before people came.
Before the video kicked in, an advertisement on one of the cable channels flashed on the screen. I wish I could say I turned it off instantly, but I didn't. I was so horrified by what I saw that, frankly, I froze. I didn't - - in a way, couldn't - - immediately switch the channel.

Transfixed, what I saw was a snuff film for the early riser, three quick snippets meant to tantalize the sick-in-their-souls crowd. The first showed an armed man, swaggering up to his helpless victim, (whose entire body except for his head was encased in something that looked like a mattress), who then, almost insouciantly, puts the gun to the man's temple. Cut to second mini-clip: someone about to be crushed by an onrushing train whose approach was obscured by a second stationary train. I blinked and snapped out of my trance just in time to avoid seeing the third - - what I can only speculate was something horrible about to be inflicted on an exotic dancer.

The entire episode, which couldn't have taken 10 seconds, left me nauseous. Two things immediately came to mind. First, my 14-year- old son had slept downstairs. He might have awakened and saw what I witnessed. Second, the same stations that will not run simple black and white sketches of a partial-birth abortion will run this pornography whose (ironic) come-on was, "What they won't let you see."

It's at times like these when our nation is bouncing off the guard rails that pro-lifers, or anyone with a conscience, might be tempted to throw up their hands and just sue for mercy from God. Why don't we? Both because to do so would be to fail in our sacred responsibilities (there is no escape clause when fulfilling the task God has laid upon us) and because we hold fast to the conviction that there remains in the American heart a deep well of compassion and goodness.

Someone (I think it may have been Fr. James Burtchaell) once wrote that love is not something that happens to you, it's something you do. In other words, love is an act of the will, not of passing affections; of faithfulness, not transitory commitment; and of obligations willingly maintained, not discarded when no longer convenient.

Those are qualities that, alas, are honored more in the breach than in the observance these days. Not so with pro-lifers. You are (in Burtchaell's memorable phrase) "pledging people." By this he meant (as described in For Better, For Worse, a wonderful book that explores the Christian understanding of marriage) a " yielding of choice, a mortgaging of say-so over one's own affairs."

Burtchaell details on the pages of this lovely book something already written on the hearts of pro-lifers: that such obligations, paradoxically, are liberating. "Precisely by rising to meet one's commitments a person grows to have a greater and more giving will." Such fidelity, he writes, "is one of the most powerful ways to emerge from egotism into love."

Your response to the evil of abortion reminds me of the sentiments that undergird our church's video, which I previewed to help wash away the slime of the cable ad. In each case the response to ugliness was an appeal to the better angels of our nature by doing for others.

Each also affirmed the truth that God does not expect everyone to do, or give, the same. He does expect us as His children to sacrifice equally. As a pro-lifer that sacrifice, for example, could be raising your children to revere innocent life, manning the booth at the state fair, contributing to NRLC, working to elect or re-elect pro-life candidates, offering intercessory prayers for pregnant women, their unborn children, and the abortionist who has swapped his soul for money - - or a hundred other important items.

In so doing you refuse to allow the grotesque to be normalized or the merciless to be disguised as "the least bad" option. This may not be glamorous work, as the world sees it, but it is the kind of loving steadfastness that ultimately will carry the day for those whose survival depends on our unyielding commitment.

dha