Abortion is ...

I went to Lowes the other day, and parked behind someone who drives a truck and must have led a rather sheltered life. He or she had probably not suffered or known anyone who had suffered any kind of abuse, and it is unlikely that they have ever worked with at risk youth. They certainly had no imagination. How do I know this? Well, I read their bumper sticker. “Abortion is the ultimate child abuse.” My first thought was to run into Lowes and gather up the materials to make my own bumper sticker, and then slap it on that bumper right next to those words of wisdom. Mine would have said: “Rape ain’t that great either.” Maybe I just have an over active imagination, but in the one minute walk into Lowes I thought of about a dozen forms of child abuse I thought might just be worse than abortion. I can even imagine that real children might have experienced these figments of my imagination. I can even imagine that children over the age of one can be abused in more savage ways than a fetus. It might not be all imagination, though, as I have worked with kids who grew up in war zones and kids who suffered abuse and kids who watched their parents do violence to one another right here in this country. Maybe most importantly, I am aware that the story doesn’t end once we get a child out of the womb. I think that’s the real problem with my truck driver and like minded folks. No one likes abortion, but some of us are aware that all babies don’t leave the hospital and live happily after all and that the mothers don’t enter the hospital out of a fairy tale either. Abortion doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It is important to understand the rest of the story, the one that started more than a month or two ago and won’t end in eight or nine months. Abortion really is … too complicated to summarize on a bumper sticker.