It's been 40 years.
This is 40:
Planned Parenthood personnel have aborted over 5,300,000 children since 1970. That’s equal to the entire population of Colorado. In 2009, 97.6 percent of Planned Parenthood’s “services" for pregnant women involved killing their children, and only 2.4 percent involved prenatal care or adoption referral.
An estimated 55 million abortions have been legally performed in the United States since that time.
Roe has never been accepted by the American people as a whole as a valid constitutional decision. It is widely regarded, even among liberal academics, as poorly reasoned—at best. Many scholars and others (including more than a few who are not pro-life in their moral and political convictions) regard it as a glaring (and even embarrassing) example of the judicial usurpation of authority left by the Constitution in the hands of the people and their elected representatives. EvenRoe’s diehard supporters tend to defend it on the grounds that it is an “established precedent,” not on the grounds that it is correct as a matter of constitutional interpretation.
This is 40:
Blessed Mother Teresa of Calcutta summarized the legacy of Roe when she said 'America needs no words from me to see how your decision in Roe vs. Wade has deformed a great nation. The so-called right to abortion has pitted mothers against their children and women against men. It has sown violence and discord at the heart of the most intimate human relationships. It has aggravated the derogation of the father’s role in an increasingly fatherless society. It has portrayed the greatest of gifts – a child – as a competitor, an intrusion and an inconvenience.' "
If we would open our hearts to the the sorrow with which God aches we too would ache for the millions of babies, and children, and young people, and whole families which He willed to entrust to our care, but who are not here because of what we have willed. We must weep over our own blind self-deception in believing that any decision regarding life is private affair. We are all implicated in one another's decisions irrespective of whether we are male or female, friends or enemies, atheists or believers. The decision not to welcome or protect life is always a social reality, the most inhumane form of social poverty that can inflict any family or community -- and God's heart can only weep over us for having fallen into such misery.
By prayer and fasting there is still the opportunity that we might be pierced to the heart. It is still possible for us to know compunction over the fact that instead of protecting motherhood and supporting those whose desperate situations drove them to despair, we viewed their plight as an inconvenience that needed to be dispatched as efficiently as possible. Sorrow can still drive us to the hope of prayer and by this hope to a new beginning.
If heaven is dismayed that we who have been blessed far beyond anything we ever deserved chose to be callous towards those who most needed our help, our encouragement, our love -- we still may yet be astonished by the mercy of God in which even the evil of our personal decisions finds its limit. In prayer, the tears of faith access the power of God who in unimaginable mercy is waiting to heal the alienation and coldness of heart our own actions have brought on ourselves. In such holy conversation with the One who knows the deepest truth of our hearts, baptized in holy tears of repentance and gratitude, the grace of a change of heart yearns to unfold and new possibilities that we cannot imagine await us.
Lord have mercy.
Amen.
