Pray for Michelle

Yesterday, I received the following email from "Michelle". Obviously, this is an urgent matter. Please pray that her mind is changed and her child's life is spared:

Dear Abort73.com

I'm glad I have visited your website. I've just turned 18 this year and I have fallen pregnant. I have thought long and hard about whether to keep this child or abort it, as I don't feel like I am ready or responsible enough to raise a child, (much like other women). After spending an hour or two on your site, it has really given me some insight into making a wise decision. I am confidently going to abort this child.

Your facts and statistics are cold, heartless and sometimes inappropriate. Your message boards made me feel pity for those who are so hung up on being pro-life, and feel the need to push their opinions onto others. Members seemed uneducated, ignorant, obnoxious and narrow-minded. So much about your site and other pro-life propaganda is one sided, biased and to be frank, ridiculous.

Your ideas about rape and poverty made me so sad. How could any sane, mature person just expect a woman to go through with having a child when the circumstances are so terrible? The quality of the child and mothers life would be potentially awful. Do we really want to bring children into this kind of environment? Is it fair? I don't think so. How do you explain to your child that they were a product of rape? I'd like to know, because your website seems to have an answer and opinion on everything regarding the issue.

I think your merchandise is really off. How inconsiderate of you to parade such a sensitive issue about with such ignorance.

I would like to add that I don't believe any male should truly be able to make justified comments about the issue of abortion. It is a woman's body, responsibility and choice what she does with her life and her unborn.

I would love you to reply, if you have anything worthwhile to say to me.

Michelle,

Thanks for the email. It was painful to read, but I appreciate your honesty. Here's my story, in a nutshell. I'm 30 years-old. My wife and I have two kids of our own, Seth (4) and Melanie (2), and we take care of two other girls (2 yrs and 9 mos.) Monday through Friday. We moved from Los Angeles to Rockford, IL almost five months ago, in part to join some friends at a new church, and in part to lower our cost of living so that I can continue to maintain the Abort73 website. We rent an undersized two bedroom house that just manages to hold us all, and I work a couple side jobs to pay the bills. I share that with you in hopes that it will feel more like you're talking to a person and less like you're talking to an organization or a "cause". I do know the difficulties of life. I know the difficulties of raising children.

A few years ago, I was exposed to a presentation on the frequency and mechanisms of abortion, and I quickly became convinced that abortion is an act of violence that kills a tiny human being. The more I researched, the more obvious it became. So much so, that I ended up leaving my job at a regional business journal and starting into "pro-life" work full-time. Abort73 is my best effort to systematically demonstrate that abortion is cruel and unjust on a multitude of levels. In that sense, there is probably not much more I can add to this email. You've already rejected what I feel is the most compelling information I have to offer. I cannot speak for the content or character of that which you'll find on the message board since it is all user generated, but I do apologize that you found the site itself so insensitive and ridiculous. We are biased, just like every other abortion related organization in existence, but I've gone to great lengths to try and demonstrate why our biases are well-founded. The sources for our facts, statistics and images are all cited so that people can verify their accuracy. If you can identify the specific statements that you found the most suspect, perhaps I can address them more directly.

Regarding pregnancies that are conceived through rape, the only reason we maintain that a woman who has been violently assaulted should not abort her pregnancy is because abortion, itself, is a violent assault on another person. Humanity is the central question in all of this. If it is a human being, living and growing inside of a pregnant woman, then that human being deserves to be protected. If it is not a human being inside of her, then, absolutely, the woman should be free to destroy it. If unborn embryos and fetuses are not human beings, then women should be free to abort no matter how they came to be pregnant, but if unborn embryos and fetuses are human beings, they should be protected, even if they were conceived through the despicable act of rape.

To demonstrate, I have worked, in the past, with a guy named Marlo. Marlo is in his mid-twenties and he is alive today because his mother was raped and decided not to have an abortion. He had a miserable childhood. The mom who didn't abort him was an addict. They lived in poverty, and he was frequently abandoned until he finally just left home as a teenager. Today, Marlo is a husband and father who sought out his mom all these years later to reconcile the relationship and thank her for not aborting him. On the other side of the coin, we received this email earlier this summer:

I chose abortion as a result of rape/incest. It has been 24 years and I have struggled every day. I now work in a crisis pregnancy center and help host a 3-day post-abortive retreat each fall. The results of the choices these women made are very evident in their daily lives and quite heartbreaking. I wish my voice was louder, my presence was more well known. But even though I am only one woman my voice counts. Thank you for what you are doing.

I don't know if there is still an opportunity to change your mind, but the fact that you took the time to write gives me some hope. Perhaps your doubts still linger. I'll close with this. If you abort your child, you will be aborting a person who would have probably grown up to be someone's husband or wife, someone's mommy or daddy, and, eventually someone's grandparent. This goes way beyond one life. One abortion affects generation after generation. You don't just abort your child, you wipe out a person who would have, in big or small ways, grown up to influence the world. That's not to say keeping your child will be easy. That's not to say there won't be times when you feel overwhelmed by the massive responsibility of being a parent, or, if you place for adoption, when you can hardly function, wondering what is happening in your child's life. All I'm saying is this. I have an entire archive of emails from women who have aborted their pregnancies in the past and would do almost anything for the chance to take that decision back. You can read some of their testimonies here: http://www.abort73.com/HTML/I-G-2-testimony.html

Expressions of grief come in week after week, but I have yet to hear from a single mother who decided not to abort, but now wishes that her child were dead. One way or the other, the decision set before you is going to largely define the rest of your life. I beg you. Give your child a chance.