A windy day of outreach in Detroit, Michigan had me holding on to my sign. One side displayed a preborn baby and the other side showed a 15-week-aborted baby.
I saw a young man cruising down the sidewalk on a skateboard. He came to a complete stop at the crosswalk right beside my sign of the living preborn baby. I asked him what he saw in my sign. He responded, “It’s a clump of cells.”
From then on, we went back-and-forth going through each hard case, basic biology, and proven statistics. We came to the conclusion that we were going nowhere. Though we were disagreeing and almost upset with each other, I felt the need to introduce myself. I shook his hand and told him my name and he told me his. From that moment, I chose to take this conversation a different route approaching more towards the heart instead of the head.
I asked him, “Do you know anyone who’s had an abortion?” He was staring at the ground for a few moments in silence.
When he lifted his head he responded, “My Mother”.
“Sorry for your loss,” I said. “How do you feel about it?”
He said he hadn’t known how to respond when he found out. “I just pushed it down inside of me.” He told me it was before he was born and his mother doesn’t talk about it much. I made sure to ask him how his mother was doing and to let him know that even though this already happened, there is still forgiveness. We touched base more on the logical argument and came to an agreement that the preborn are human. He revealed to me that not only did his mother have an abortion but that his aunt did, too. And his sister almost had an abortion, also. I gave him a brochure and showed him the hotline number on the back; it was counseling for his post-abortive mother and aunt.
“Do you love your sister’s child?” I asked.
He told me yes. I also asked if his sister’s child has value when she was this small, pointing back to my sign. He said yes. I referred back to this particular picture several times throughout this conversation, but this time I turned the sign around to show the aborted baby. His jaw dropped. He said “I can’t believe this, I won’t support it.”
And just like that, his mind was made up. The ugly truth of abortion could no longer be hidden. He thanked me for showing this to him. We talked for a while more, then finally came to a close when he said, “I didn’t know until a few years later, but my sister was planning to abort my now 8-year-old niece. Thinking back now, I don’t know how I could live without her.”
– Evangeline Dunn, Intern, Created Equal