I started Saturday with a road trip to Richmond. The Students for Life (SFL) group on campus goes to the Richmond Medical Center for Women once a month as sidewalk counselors. While I have been to pray outside of a growing handful of abortion facilities, I had never gone for the explicit purpose of sidewalk counseling. The three of us on this venture came armed with pictures of children in utero, information about the local pregnancy resource center, hand-written cards from people in SFL, and brochures on Rachel's Vineyard.
When we got to the yellow brick building, we found two women from a local church already there, each carrying a bag of information similar to ours. Their church sends someone to the facility every Saturday. They told us their basic strategy as I fingered my rosary inside my hoodie pocket. Because we can't enter the parking lot, they called to people as they got out of their cars and headed to the door, asking if they would like prayer or some information.
I spent most of our three hours there watching, running my fingers in circles in my pocket. A couple people took our information, but no one came to talk to us, and no one came to pray with us. One girl, visibly pregnant, left the same way -- and her mother looked so much happier on their way out! One man looked like he wanted to come talk to us, but the woman with him led their girl angrily into the building. So many human dramas happened in the cars as they pulled passed us, in the parking lot as we called to them, in the yellow brick building as we lost sight of them.
Just as the air of the CCM Chapel hangs heavy and thick like incense, made beautiful by the prayers of the past, so the air around the Richmond Medical Center for Women shivers with the knowledge of the nearby death, made sacred by the sorrows of the women who enter and leave each day. It's hard to explain the air around a place like that, but every abortion facility at which I have prayed has felt that way. Even Percy, who picked me up from Richmond and only stood on the sidewalk with us for a few minutes, felt it.
Whatever "it" is, it makes me aware that right there, no more than 50 yards from where I stand, is where people die. It impresses upon me the immediacy of this need. Sometimes, I can be content with the idea of "changing the hearts and minds of the people," and taking a long view of the change that needs to happen in our society. Not when I stand on the sidewalk, watching women and girls enter a building where a man will kill their children.
I know there is much work that must be done to have a society free of this evil. We must fight the battle on all fronts -- working at home to change hearts and minds, working in political process to affect laws, working in resource centers to provide help -- and standing on the sidewalk, praying for the women who bring their fears to that yellow brick building.
