I did something last week
that I never imagined I would do. I
added my name to an amicus brief* for
the United States Supreme Court. Concerning what was once the secret I thought
I would take with me to the grave.
As we continue after
Easter to ruminate on the obedience, the suffering, and the glorious
resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ, I know that no high court, nor
ruling party, nor nation, nor people can force evil from this broken and fallen
world. There is nothing that can accomplish this.
Nothing but the
blood of Jesus.
I know this, because...
I was just shy of 19. He was 21.
We were at university together, inseparable and certain of life as only
brand new adults can be. And we were in
love.
We had known each other
less than a year and were pretending to not be boyfriend and girlfriend so we
could both work for the summer as orientation leaders. We were assigned to rooms just across the
hall from each other. One day I found
myself sitting alone in the girls’ suite bathroom, watching the pregnancy
test. It was positive.
I only gave him a breath
or two to let it sink in. I wanted a
response, the response. I wanted him to tell me we’d get married,
we’d make it all work somehow. But in
those two eternity-encasing beats, he couldn’t absorb it all, just looked at
the floor, hearing the crushing weight of all his family’s dreams falling down
around him. Knocked breathless by the
disappointment he assumed would become his identity. He didn’t look up.
I gave him two
breaths. And when his silence had
stretched on for days in my ears, I began the panicked flailing of the drowning. I held out the yellow pages, open to the ad
I’d been staring at for hours as I’d been trying to think of how to tell him. This was the only clinic I would go to. I made demands. He would drive me to and from. He would pay for half. He wouldn’t tell anyone. Ever.
On a bright, warm day
under the June sun, I had an abortion. I
swallowed the pills and slunk away; the acid guilt and shame and hate burning
me from the inside out.
One
tiny life flown to heaven; two more on the
rapid descent into hell.
In the days that followed,
the weeks and months that just kept coming and wouldn’t stop even though I
couldn’t breathe, he pulled away. He
started to run. And I began to drown
myself – it was a very, very slow liquid attempt at expiry. Though all I wanted was to stop feeling. To forget.
To erase what had been done.
Superficially, my
self-inflicted destruction cost me a full-ride scholarship, a leadership
position in my sorority, and good standing at the school that only a year
before I’d been desperate to get into.
But what I actually lost the in process was far more valuable and even
more difficult to recover. I lost my
self – who had I become? I lost all the certainty of youth – the world
was a dark place, more finite than I had ever realized; I was part of and party
to that evil. I lost friends because I
had to hide my pain away from them, acting as if all was fine so we wouldn’t be
found out. And I lost the Officer. I only reminded him of what we’d done. Thus he ran, as far away as he could.
To his credit, in a
last-ditch effort to save me from myself before he left, the Officer kept
dragging me to church. I thought I was
condemned to hell anyway, so I would show up smelling like the hangover I was
nursing. Sitting in the sanctuary only
made me feel vile, and used up. I knew
if anyone could see who I really was they would turn, with pitchforks and
torches, to drive me out of their holy place.
We even went on Mother’s Day. We
sat in the very back of the huge auditorium, as we always did; the pastor
lauded mothers as the ushers handed out flowers and I studied the floor. Then from the pulpit came blessings for the young
women of childbearing age; the usher handed me a flower. A solitary, red rose. My lungs forgot how to pull air in. I shook the entire ride home. Neither the Officer nor I looked at one
another.
And then he was gone. No phone calls, only sparse letters, and some
photos of a boy in camo. All the while,
I kept sinking. When he was away from me, the
Officer turned. He set his face toward
the Light. He wrote home about God and His love and the
Father’s plan for our lives. I didn't doubt God's love for the Officer, I doubted His ability to leave me unpunished.
Time withered as it will,
distancing us from the abortion, so that eventually a white dress, a bow tie,
and the smell of stargazer lilies preceded our flight to the top of the world;
and we learned how to be in love, in the snow and the dark. Even there, the Officer kept dragging me to
church. I was his wife, still drowning, though
less so with him to desperately clutch; but still frightened of how and when
God would exact His vengeance.
For
murder cannot go un-punished; the ground cries out with blood.
Again, I sat in the back
of a church, both listening and hiding.
She was rail thin, with hair that was too Texas and boots too lower-48
to draw me in. Until she opened her
mouth. Ten abortions. I sat
up. She wove her story with grace,
nimbly treading over words that I didn’t know they allowed on altars. Ten.
If God could forgive ten, maybe He would forgive one. When the altar call came, I bowed my head and
pressed my eyelids together so hard it felt that the rainbow explosions were
what kept the tears in.
Please,
I begged, please. Forgive
me.
What I hadn’t realized, in
all that time I spent in the backs of all those churches, was that the ground
did cry out for blood, that vengeance was God’s to exact. But that He already had.
God
took His rightful, just, and holy vengeance for my abortion out on His Only
Son. The blood that satisfied my debit
had been spilt over 2,000 years ago. The
Only Son of the Living God already gave
His life in my stead. He was simply
waiting for me to accept His payment on my behalf.
The mill-stone which
pressed me to this earth was raised off my shoulders in that balcony, as soon
as the desperate plea was formed in my mind.
Suddenly, I remembered how to breathe.
My eyes opened to new brightness, and my heart felt light again, for the
first time in years. There was singing,
there was study and prayer; there was a peace in my spirit that hadn’t existed
before. I went to church as a member of
the body of Christ, not just an outsider trying to appease the Officer. I wasn’t running anymore. I had stopped drowning, I started healing,
and I began to swim.
Some years later, I read Psalm 139. I wasn’t Bible scholar enough back then to
know to avoid that piece of the book; so when it cropped up for a women’s study,
I didn’t expect it to knock the wind out of me.
I still have the Bible I first read it in. The page is stained with my tears and the
note – for at that point, I was comfortable putting my words alongside God’s –
that said, “He knew. But He loved me anyway.” The simple truth that my daughter was being
knit together by the Divine in my womb even as I made the choice to end her
life. God knew. And true that His love for her is great; His
love for me was always just as great, as it is for all of His children – those who
are smack in the middle of sinning, as well as those who are being sinned
against. Those He calls His own through
their relationship with His Son; and those whom He desires should not perish
away from Him. God the Father sent His
Son to seek the lost and to save the sinners – of which each person on the
planet can number themselves.
Jesus came to save me. Jesus came to save you.
As a redeemed child of
God, I am so thankful that there are people in the body of Christ who are
talking about abortion – not just holding angry signs outside of clinics. People who know that, yes abortion should be
stopped; but also that the One in Four Women
between the ages of 15 and 30**
who have made this choice can be saved, can be healed, can be restored. That we all, post-abortive or non,
desperately need the blood of Jesus to take away our sins. If we accept it,
there is nothing the blood of
Jesus doesn’t cover.
Nothing.
This vital truth must proceed
another that is just as necessary to proclaim, for the gospel has to take prevalence
over everything else. But following it, I
must say, with the certainty of experience, that the intentional ending of a
human life through the means we call “abortion” is wrong. Dearest reader, the pills and the procedures have
to stop. The physical, emotional,
psychological, and spiritual devastation crippling our mothers, our sisters, our
friends, and ourselves must cease. As
rational people who are allowed the privilege of guiding the law of our nation,
we cannot continue to delude ourselves into thinking that this is a women’s
rights issue; or that abortions are somehow inseparable from women’s health
care. We cannot keep swallowing the lies
that make women sums of their parts, so that a uterus or vagina is somehow
equated with the paramount of ontological woman-ness. We have to stop choking down the idea that in
order to be liberated from antiquated gender roles, women have been afforded
some fundamental right to put another human to death. It is time to use our reasoning and to
critically examine the claims of a multi-billion
dollar industry that wants us to think that abortion is a right instead of a
money-generating product.
As a nation, but even more
so as a people who know that Every. Single. Life. is uniquely and beautifully
created by God, we must end abortion.
For the love of
God, for the sake of Jesus Christ, for the cry of the Holy Spirit.
If you have experienced an
abortion in your past, please know that you are not alone; and there is hope
and healing available. You can private
message me on Twitter (@jenKbaros),
on Facebook (Jennifer
Smith Baros), through my website (Aletheia Ministries),
or by personal e-mail (barospack@gmail.com). Any contact I receive is completely
confidential.
