I have been involved in pro-life work for 36 years. Once I understood that abortion kills an innocent human life, I knew that I had to do something. Few issues have gripped my heart and my conscience as this one has.

I have prayed, fasted and donated. I formed and helped lead a chapter of the California ProLife Council for 26 years. I have written letters to legislators and editors, surveyed my representatives and published voter guides, demonstrated, and met personally with my state and federal representatives.

I advocated for children with special needs, worked for a camp for abused children, and currently work for my local pregnancy care center.

I adopted three children deemed “hard to place”.

So why am I sad when the thing I’ve worked and prayed for finally happens?

I am not sad because Roe v. Wade was overturned – far from it. To overturn a bad Supreme Court decision based upon a faulty premise is a good thing. In a democracy, the people should vote in new rights as they see fit through legislation, not take what should be legislated and try to shoehorn it into our Constitution, which is silent on the issue.

I am glad that this decision is back in the hands of the people, where it belongs. But I am not naive. Sadly, I expect that abortion will be enshrined into federal law eventually.

No, I am grieving for my culture. Back when I started pro-life work, many women were being lied to. It’s just a mass of tissue, they were told. It’s not life yet. Pro-lifers are only interested in controlling women’s bodies.

But then came ultrasound. And over the years since, scientists – pro-abortion scientists – have overwhelmingly agreed that life does indeed begin at conception.*

What grieves me is that now we all know. We all know what abortion actually is. We all know that abortion kills an innocent human being. We can couch it in terms like “choice” and “reproductive rights”, but we all know. And yet the culture still demands it.

I could understand it, and have compassion for the other side when I believed people were acting in ignorance. Well-meaning people could close their eyes to the facts in a time of stress and fear when the truth about abortion was still being passed over and swept under the rug.

But that is no longer the case. Now people are demanding the right to kill babies up to birth for any reason at all. And some even advocate going beyond birth into infanticide. We rightly condemn murder in all other instances, but somehow this form of murder has become sacrosanct in our culture.

So I am sad at a time when I should be celebrating. Because I am beginning to comprehend how deeply depraved our culture has become.

A culture can sink no lower than when it screams and demands and threatens and protests for the right to kill children.

There are times when good people are compelled to act against evil. In every generation, there have been those who stood out, stood up, and stood for something against the tide of culture. Abortion is the issue of my generation. Civil rights the generation before, Nazism before that, women’s suffrage, child labor, and slavery before that. Often history vindicates those who stood up for the causes that culture had previously scorned.

I used to believe that would be the case with abortion, but sometimes I wonder.

In the meantime, what do pro-lifers do now in the face of the rage around us? Simply the same things we have been doing all along: Help hurting women. Advocate for their children. And pray that one day, killing children will finally be a thing of the past.

*”Biologists’ Consensus on ‘When Life Begins’”, Steven Andrew Jacobs, Northwestern Prizker School of Law; University of Chicago – Department of Comparative Human Development July 25, 2018

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cam?abstract_id=3211703

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