What kind of people walk into your local abortion mill?

There are any number of common myths, lies we tell ourselves, to somehow make it all seem not so horrible. The first lie is that the clientele at the local mill is made up of sweet faced high school girls who got carried away with their boyfriends, and come in blissfully ignorant of what goes on inside. There are people at the mill that fit this description, but they are exceedingly rare.

The second lie is that they are women in hopelessly desperate straits that see no other way out. The boyfriend has threatened to beat her if she doesn’t abort his child. The step-father threatens to kill her if she doesn’t abort his child. The rent check is about to bounce, and she will lose her job if anyone finds out she is pregnant. Again there are people at the mill that fit this description, but they are exceedingly rare.

The third lie is that those who come are peculiarly wicked people, that they come equipped with bulging bellies and horns on their heads, their mouths spewing angry obscenities. There certainly are people who fit this description, minus the horns. But they are by no means the majority.

The first myth is useful to us because it persuades us that all we need to do is educate the world. Write a letter to the editor. Engage in a debate on facebook. Hand out pamphlets. The myth reinforces the notion that what is wrong in the world is a lack of information, and that what will cure us is more teaching. If we can just get this ad on television, this other message on billboards, if we can just persuade everyone that the unborn are babies, the nightmare will end. But the nightmare is that they already know. They are abundantly conscious that a baby is growing inside them. And they want to kill it.

The second myth is useful to us because it persuades us that all we need to do is write a check. If we support our local crisis pregnancy center we will put an end to abortion. It is a wonderful thing indeed to support your local crisis pregnancy center. It will not, however stop people from murdering their babies. Do we really think that anyone willing to murder her baby because of difficult circumstances would not murder her baby were circumstances less difficult? Changing circumstances isn’t changing hearts.

The third myth may be the most dangerous. When we think this way, that those who procure abortions hiss and spit and spew vile profanations we push this evil away from us, as if it were some alien beings doing such horrors. We excuse our inaction on the grounds that these people are not like us, but are sinners of a whole other order. We think that it may just be a good thing that these kinds of people not reproduce, because it will just bring more of their kind of evil into the world.

The truth is that the people who come to the mill are decidedly ordinary. They are the people behind you at the grocery store, or the person bagging your groceries. They are the person beside you in the pew, whose confidence that God forgives leads them to deadly presumption, or the elder’s daughter who spares the family name by murdering the heir. They are people like me, who know they are carrying babies in their bellies. They are people like me, who have problems and challenges in their lives, who prefer to put their problems behind them. They are people like me who will stoop to nearly any shame to hide the shame they already stooped to. Nothing will change until we come to understand that abortion is not a them issue but a we issue, that the sinful hearts that procure abortions are just like the sinful hearts that think we can pay them off, inform them or ignore them. Neither will anything change until we come to understand as well that the babies being brought there are also just like our babies. Ordinary people do extraordinarily wicked things every ordinary day.