| U.S. News

After participating in this Pro-Life vigil I have decided to go for training in abortion counseling so I can help even more

BETHPAGE, TN (Catholic Online) - I want to tell you about my vigil at the abortion clinic for 40 Days for Life, a national campaign, but first of all, I am not an activist. I am an unspectacular wife and mother of two. I have never been to an abortion clinic for any reason at all.

After some introspection I discovered I was a little afraid of them, and getting "too deep" into the whole abortion issue. I liken it to Mother Teresa’s admonishments about identifying with the poorest of the poor, living with them, serving them, becoming one of them.

I believe I have always had an instinctive, knee-jerk repulsion of the horror of abortion that translated into a fear of getting too close to these babies, and the people who kill them. Yet who could be poorer?

It was researching this issue in the Scriptures that provoked my vigil. Our society sanitizes it and makes it incredibly easy to do so, but so many who are active in the trenches know far better than I that there is no greater evil on earth today. It truly is a holocaust of millions and millions, all while we go about our perfumed, prosperous lives unwilling to really see what atrocities are taking place.

Finding myself pulled into the fray even in this smallest of ways was disconcerting, to say the least, but I chose an hour and prepared to go.

Pouring rain was forecast for the whole day, so I gathered up rain gear, complete with hats and boots, for me and my eleven year old. Having been on several, the preparations had the feeling of a mission trip, the knowledge that anything can happen, good or bad, and that God would multiply our small effort and use it somehow in a secret and eternal way, and the anticipation of being utterly cut off from anything comfortable or ordinary.

Although I knew he could go and behave beautifully, I called a babysitter for the three year old because it would be raining. I made and laminated a sign on neon poster board that said “LOVE.” A friend contacted me and made arrangements to go with us, and I was glad to have a man in the group, as it made me feel a bit safer. I knew my husband would be praying for us. I was ready, although intimidated.

The next morning, the babysitter called and begged off with swine flu. I could already see we were in for a challenge from the “principalities and powers in high places,” so I added prayer after prayer to St. Michael and the Blessed Mother for protection and fortitude to those I had been praying all week.

I threw together rain gear, snacks and water for the three year old, we drove to town for Mass, and then to a piano lesson. My heart pounded every time I thought about the clinic as I waited for my son to get out of his lesson; I think I expected spiritual attack and heavy spiritual oppression, and was afraid of that, but now I know the attacks were in the days before. I swung by to pick up my reader and we headed 45 miles into the city in the rain, my trepidation growing every minute.

When we got there, there was already one woman present, and another followed the four of us up. We were not allowed on the clinic property, so we stood across the street directly in front. There was a pro-life counselor from the rescue center two doors down standing on the street on the closest side. She confronted every patron of the clinic with, “You don’t really want to kill your baby, do you?”

The two biggest surprises were that it was not oppressive at all for me and that the time flew by. Instead of evil, what I felt was a very deep sadness as I prayed and watched girls go in and out of the clinic. It was a sadness that pulled me forward and made me reluctant to leave, and had I been alone I would have stayed.

I wanted to speak peace to those women, to touch them, to make them feel the warmth of humanity somehow and wake them from their murderous stupor. They kept their heads down like convicted criminals as they went in, but the sad thing was how their body language communicated the desire to remain out side the clinic.

While they walked toward the door with their heads down, their bodies seemed reluctant to reach it, as though they were being pulled back by an unseen hand. In the clinic, out to the car, back into the clinic, back out to the car. A mind and heart in complete turmoil. A tiny human being in the balance.

I knelt in the grass holding my sign; I prayed several rosaries. The kids were completely silent. My three year old held the sign and a rosary some, but mostly he just stood beside me. A lady, a mother, got out of her truck and screamed at me to “take that baby indoors and get him out of the rain” as she waited for her daughter to come out. If I cared for my baby I would not let him stand out in the cold and rain, she yelled angrily.

I found that critique funny since my 3 year old routinely plays in the rain and mud, but I said ...