Homily

I saw a very short but very moving little piece of video recently and I want to share it with you. A young woman, a man my age, a lady with glasses and gray hair come on the screen, one by one, and ask the question, “Could you look me in the eye, could you look me in the eye?”—a young man of Asian background, a young mother, a very young boy, an African man, a woman in her forties, a woman older than she is. One by one these people appear on the screen, asking the questions, “Can you look me in the eye and tell me that I shouldn’t exist, that I should be dead, that I deserved to die that day, can you look me in the eye and tell me that my very survival was a mistake, that I am a burden to society? Can you look me in the eye and tell me that in my most vulnerable state I was nothing more than a parasite, a collection of body parts, less than human? Can you look me in the eye and tell me that I was worthless?”

So what are these people talking about? They were all survivors of abortion and they wanted to tell their stories. Their mothers chose different methods of trying to end their lives, but for different reasons, in each case, they survived the attempt to exterminate them. Each person later learned how they escaped death in the womb and each one of them explains the method that was used to end their lives. How gruesome when one woman tells she was the victim of saline infusion abortion that was meant to poison and scald her to death.

This woman then tells us, “I am the face of choice. I am that choice.” What a shockingly true statement. The film closes with the words, “These are actual human beings who survived abortion procedures, when they were still in their mothers’ wombs. These are the eyes, voices, and faces of ‘choice.’ ‘Choice’ is not merely a word. ‘Choice’ is a person.”

It is estimated that in 2018, 876,000 abortions took place and we can be sure there were probably very few survivors of those killings. All of those lives, male and female, from so many different backgrounds and parents, all of those lives who will never give voice to a video. All of those lives whose feet will never walk on this earth as their mothers and fathers did. All of those lives ended in just one year’s time. We commend their unborn souls to the mercy of the merciful Lord.

I was particularly moved when the young man asked the question, “Can you look me in the eye and tell me I was worthless?” It’s hard to imagine what it would be like to think that the laws of our country considered you to be worthless. Even harder to wonder what it must be like for your own mother to consider you worthless. How difficult it must be to carry that burden.

As I was looking for this video online I ran across another video of college students demonstrating somewhere, in favor of abortion, chanting and waving signs, “My body—my choice.” So easy to do when those who are done away with are faceless and voiceless to you, invisible people you would allow to die. So easy to do when you talk about the rights of mothers to extinguish the lives of potential mothers in the womb you do not see. But I wonder how many of those chanting protestors would still be as enthusiastic for death by choice on the unborn, after they would see this two-minute video of abortion survivors, after they saw the faces that survived their mothers’ choice, after they heard the voices they believe should never have been heard, and seen the faces they were never meant to see. Would they tell the survivors, “You ruined your mother’s choice and you shouldn’t be here. It was her body, her choice, and you were just a worthless mass of tissue that should have been thrown away with the trash?” Could they look them in the eye and say those things?

We live in a society where the law allows adults and teenagers to end the life of the most vulnerable of all its citizens. Let us pray for those women who have aborted, for those women considering abortion, for those fathers responsible for the life of their child, for family members and friends involved in some way with the unborn and for victims of attempted extermination who survived the attacks on their lives.

We must do our part where we can, but only with prayer and fasting will this great evil leave our country. May the Lord hear