This I Believe

IT MATTERS TO THIS ONE

I am talking to a woman who eloped at age seventeen to marry a young man everyone warned her about. She tells me her story.

From their wedding night it was obvious she had made a terrible mistake, for it was then that the physical violence began. As she sat, bruised and shaking, she knew that her parents’ worst predictions had come true. But in a matter of days she was a thousand miles away, living in a small town in New Mexico.

When she telephoned to tell her parents where she was, they had responded, “You’ve made your bed. Now lie in it.”

And she tried to, as best she could. And then the worst thing of all happened: she found herself pregnant. With only a high school education, hundreds of miles away from relatives and friends, she was cut off and abandoned.

She tells me with tears in her eyes that she was desperate. She knew even then that children in such a marriage would be abused, too. Had abortions been available in that time, fifty years ago, she would have unhesitatingly sought one.

The child was born, and another. Her fears were realized. His rages began to be focused at times on the children. Many times the husband would leave for long periods of time, and she would sell furniture and household goods to buy groceries. Another child was born. He cheated on her with other women, buying diamond-and-emerald rings for these women, while his wife and daughter folded newspapers in torn fabric to use for sanitary pads because there was no money.

As we talk, she recalls her first pregnancy, the profundity of the emotions of the lonely twenty-year-old she was. She does not say what she says to hurt me, but it does.

With that hurt comes a rush of love for her, of admiration for her courage, of gratitude for her perseverance. We look at the black-and-white photograph of her in the hospital holding her first baby.

Holding me.

You see, the questions of the morality of protests at abortion clinics are, to me, somewhat relative to a greater personal reality. I am puzzled by the thinking that any of us knows enough about the long-term future to be willing to kill to avert it.

And the matter of when life begins is much less important to me than this truth: we each only have one life. If the Bible is true–and I believe it is– then there is no reincarnation, no “overs” on living.

The childhood I described wasn’t a great childhood, but it was my only childhood. It stands in my life as the great witness to the truth of Romans 8:28, that God will work all things for good.

Simply put, I’d rather have lived, than not have lived.

The statistics on abortion are staggering. They numb the mind.

I can only speak for one. And it matters, very much, to this one.