This is for all the lost children

One of the signs I saw at the March.

When you lay me down sleeping and my heart is weeping
Because I’m keeping a place...

For all the lost children
This is for all the lost children
This one’s for all the lost children, wishing them well
And wishing them home...

This past Friday I walked in the 37th Annual March for Life in Washington, D.C.

It was so many things for me: an honor, a joy, a fun experience, a humbling experience, an affirming and empowering experience, it gave me hope, it gave me courage, it made me laugh, it made me smile, it broke my heart and made me think...

It's been almost 4 decades since abortion - the killing of children in their mothers' wombs - was made legal in this land, the United States of America.

In the same land where we now routinely operate on these not-yet born little ones, to save their lives in the womb. In the same land where if someone kills a pregnant woman, they are charged with two murders.

But even that last one is no guarantee. Last year, when 14 people were killed at Fort Hood, only 13 were "counted" against the man guilty of the crime. Which goes against the law. (That article was written before the formal charges were made, which in the end left out the unborn child.)

I had to watch a video on the Tate/La Bianca murders of 1969 in a class in high school. If I remember correctly, they never seemed to count Sharon Tate's unborn baby, even though she was 8 months pregnant when she was killed. This has always baffled me, since in other cases the baby's death would be counted. Unless I am just getting it wrong, somehow, and they were counting the baby.

The murder of already-born persons is illegal. Granted, it still happens. Even if Roe v. Wade were overturned, abortion would sadly continue, though in lesser numbers, to be sure. To end abortion we must change the culture.

At any rate, how has the legal killing of anyone managed to go on for nearly 40 years??? Science agrees: life begins at conception.

And so we fight. We pray and we fight to spread the truth, to spread awareness, to change hearts.

We have lost nearly one-third of my generation to abortion alone.

That just floors me every time.

I remember when I first saw that statistic, plus others, like the fact that about 50 million "legal" abortions have occurred since 1973.

50 million??????????????

And that is just in the United States alone. This does not include all the other countries around the world.

That is far more than the number of Jews killed by Nazis in WWII, which is about 6 million. Even if one includes all the other non-Jewish victims of the Nazis, that number is "only" 7 - 11 million.

This is not to disregard their horrific deaths. Not at all. That makes me sick, too. This is just to try and put it in perspective.

We have killed more children "legally" in the US alone in less than 4 decades than were killed by the Nazis in their concentration camps. And that genocide is in history books and countless other books and movies and has its own museums and memorials and remembrance days ..... all to remember the dead, and that we might never do that again.

But what about all the little children in their mothers' wombs??? Who will remember them?

The Jews were dehumanized. So were the slaves.

And the baby in the womb is definitely dehumanized.

How can we warn about the dangers of drinking alcohol or doing drugs while pregnant, because of the effect it will have on the unborn baby, and still allow abortion??????

We live in a world of double standards and disconnects, of two-faced lies and selfishness.



When I first learned this, this 50 million, it made me weak in the knees. I felt quite literally sick, sick to my stomach. Like I wanted to throw up. I remember just being completely and utterly overwhelmed. I still cannot fully wrap my mind around it. Part of me feels like fainting, another part wants to die, it's so horrific and awful and ....human words fail to describe it.

Yes, I remember that day, first learning these numbers, these statistics. I remember how instinctively, I reached for my own womb, clutched my own body, as if I had a baby there. Of course I didn't, but still, I felt this need to protect, to shield... I felt personally violated, as if my own womb had been desecrated, my own baby ripped from me.

I remember, too, when the tears began to fall, and how my heart was breaking and bleeding inside. How I choked out a plea to God to stop it, and asked Him "why?"

Why?

And how?

Then I stumbled into my room, feeling sick and weak and confused, and fell onto my bed and sobbed.

Still, still I cannot fathom it all. Still, I start to tremble when I think about it. Still, I feel personally violated and the need to shield my womb, my baby, though there is no baby there.


I am a survivor. In more ways than one. I was born after Roe v. Wade. Anyone born after January 1973 is a survivor in this way. We could have been legally killed.

I am also a survivor because I was born prematurely by C-section. I was 6 weeks early, making me 7 1/2 months in the womb. I weighed 2 lbs., 11 oz. Preemies don't always survive. Some have problems in life. I did not, I was lucky. Besides the fact that I had to be born then to save the life of both me and my mother, who had toxemia.

When I learned just what "partial-birth" abortion meant, and was equally sickened, and then learned that it was legal in Britain (I think it may still be, too)....that was when it dawned on me that at the time I was born, I could have been "legally" killed by partial-birth abortion in the UK.

Partial-birth abortion is basically what it sounds like. If you need graphic descriptions, look it up elsewhere, I'm pretty sure Abort73 tells about it. Basically, the baby is too far developed in the womb for the "usual" abortion procedures, so the baby is partially delivered, then killed. But babies born at these stages are usually called premature babies. I was one. But some don't get to live and be called "preemies." Some are killed.


ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.....


And so this is why we march. This is why I marched. This is why we do what we do, why we learn all we can, seek to educate, change public policy, change hearts, save lives. For the 1/3 of my generation alone in the US who has been lost. For all the children lost.

Holy Innocents, killed at the orders of King Herod, first martyrs for Christ, though you did not know it, pray for all the little ones here in danger of abortion. Pray for their mothers and their fathers. Pray that this carnage will end. Pray, dear Holy Mary, Mother of Life. Pray.




This is for all the lost children.

A "Madonna and Child" in the Basilica of the National Shrine
of the Immaculate Conception. They, like hundreds upon hundreds of us,
were sitting on the floor. It was packed to bursting for the Vigil Mass for Life.
This scene was as an icon of the Blessed Virgin and the Baby Jesus to me, bespeaking their presence in all things.

(song quoted is 'The Lost Children,' by Michael Jackson.)