Round Two

Today began Rotation Two of my internship: my time with SFLA. I enjoyed my time with FFL, and I can't say I wanted to leave the quiet office for the high-paced, hyperactive office of SFLA. But just as I discovered familiarity in Googling at FFL, so I found myself assigned to a project involving brainstorming, organizing thoughts, and writing: the kind of work I thought I'd left behind in college and knew I would miss.

Yesterday, during our "Volunteer" (read: envelop-stuffing off the unpaid clock) night, we interns watched a film "22 Weeks." I read another intern's blog entry about this film. He brought up two basic assumptions: 1) None of us have had personal experiences of abortion and 2) "You cannot stare at evil long without being affected adversely."

Well, my fellow intern and 3 loyal readers, I would like to refute gently the first assumption and discuss the second. Post-abortive women and men become at times the strongest of pro-life advocates, and college-aged women make up a staggering percentage of those seeking abortion. Something important to keep in mind. Almost all of us know someone, often someone dear, who has had a direct experience with abortion, even if we are not ourselves post-abortive.

"You cannot stare at evil long without being affected adversely." Sometimes, this fact worries me. In this line of work, one cannot help but stare at evil. Graphic images, of course, depict the results of the action, and no matter how hard one tries to avoid it, one will see them in the movement. The film certainly displayed, in visual form, images that left me stunned.

However, the evil that worries me more does not manifest in images against which I can close my eyes. In order to be effective in what we strive to do, we need to stare the evil of the mindset, the train of thought, the logic, the rhetoric of culture of death. To answer their questions, to speak in a language they understand, we need to listen to them. And that evil eats more subtly at the soul. Especially for a feminist, it calls out with a type of deadly seduction. It's easy to imagine, when one hears the manner in which they address the pro-life cause, that we've gotten it all wrong and are sadly deluded.

According to my fellow blogger, "It is then when we must gaze into the face of God." It is easy to fall into the seduction of women's rights rhetoric until that gaze at God calls to mind 1) that unborn person is a person of God and 2) God created each of us sacred and beautiful and nothing can take that away.