Hattip to Pat Archbold at Creative Minority Report. Congressman Marlin Stutzman (R. IN) recalls how he came very close to being an abortion statistic:
On a cold December night in 1975, a 17-year-old girl sobbed on the bedroom floor of a neighbor’s house. Her own home had just burned to the ground, destroying everything she had. But that wasn’t the only weight she carried that night. She had just discovered that she was a few weeks pregnant with her first child. In the dark, alone and terrified, she decided to find a way to Kalamazoo, Mich., 40 miles away, to “take care of her situation.”
That young girl was my mother, and if she had gone to Kalamazoo that night, you wouldn’t be reading this today. I would have been aborted.
Recently, after speaking on the House floor about the horrors of Dr. Kermit Gosnell’s abortion clinic in Philadelphia, I began wondering if my mother had ever thought about ending her unplanned pregnancy. My parents never gave any indication that it was ever a consideration, but was it?
I gave her a call. When she answered, I talked to her about my speech on the House floor and then asked gently, “Mom, did you ever think about .” There was a tense pause, and then, through tears she said, “Marlin, I’m so sorry!” As we cried together, I was no longer a congressman, but a son understanding for the first time the heartache and struggles my mom had gone through before I was born. As we talked about her fear of driving 40 miles alone, I had to think, “What if a ‘Gosnell‘ clinic was only four miles away instead of 40?”
She asked if I could forgive her. I answered, “Yes, with all my heart.” I said that I couldn’t imagine how scared she must have been, and how thankful I was for her and Dad’s strength to do the right thing and protect my life. It could have ended so differently. At home with my wife and two children that night, my heart ached at the thought that all of this might never have been.
Go here to The Washington Times to read the rest. Behind every “succesful” abortion there is a shattered “might have been” of a life and this side of the grave we can only imagine how much poorer we are as a society for the loss of those lives.
Stop it Don with this . . . you are bringing tears to my eyes.
Perhaps stories like this, along with the Gosnell case, are beginning to have an effect. I saw what might be a very small example of this today. I went to the local blood center to donate blood and while sitting in the canteen area afterward browsing through newspapers, another woman sitting across the table — a complete stranger, probably 60-ish — was doing the same. After reading a story concerning the Cleveland abduction case she abruptly remarked “How can they be charging him with murder (for causing one of his victims to have FIVE miscarriages) when they allow abortion.” And I said, “I hear ya there.” I interpreted her remark in a pro-life sense, to mean that if it was wrong for Ariel Castro to kill those unborn babies then it’s wrong for ANYONE to do it. It’s possible, I suppose, that she meant it in the opposite sense — since abortion is legal, he shouldn’t be facing murder charges — but I did not get that impression. Either way, I had to agree that there was a glaring inconsistency there.
The two things I find significant about this are, first, that she would even bring up the topic of abortion in front of a complete stranger whose viewpoint she didn’t know — for all she knew I might have been a die-hard Personal PAC or Planned Parenthood lobbyist — because I very rarely see people doing that. And second, that she would see the wrongness of abortion in the midst of the ultimate “hard case” situation — that of an abused woman repeatedly impregnated by rape, the very case that pro-aborts have used to justify abortion for decades.