The Girl Next Door, & Her Parents: Helping Our Neighbors Choose Life

When I was 16, a friend came over one night, hysterical. She was pregnant, her "boyfriend" had rejected her, and her parents were demanding she have an abortion. Her whole world was coming down around her, her heart was breaking and she didn't know what to do but run away.

This was something I had never dealt with before, but God helped me to say the right things - and she agreed to go back home if I would go with her to talk with her folks.

Her parents were not bad or unloving people. My friend had been a late-life baby, born after their other children were grown and gone. Her parents were still in love with each other, and they had been making plans for their life once this daughter went out on her own. In middle age, they felt they had already postponed their plans once, to raise her, and they had a knee-jerk reaction of "Oh no, not again."

This was in the early 1970s, shortly after Roe v Wade. The sweet photos of infants curled in their mama's womb and pro-life posters with Mother Theresa's honest words were all in future. The locusts humming "choice, choice, choice" were dominating the talk, lulling decent people into thinking that maybe sometimes abortion might be "ok" for some people. Maybe they just didn't know any better.

So we went to her house, and her parents gave us all the reasons why she should not have this baby, why they were not willing to have this baby. As they talked, I looked out the window into the back yard, where her father had mowed a message to her mother into the grass: "I love you", it read.

God brought the Edna Gladney Home to my mind, and I asked her parents if they had heard of it. They had not. I told them it's a place she can go, if she wants to let her baby be adopted by a family who cannot have children of their own. I told them there'd be no cost to them, she can continue her school there in a sheltered place with other girls, and she can meet the couple who will love and raise her baby. Their grandchild.

The more I talked, the more they relaxed. They didn't really want to force their daughter into an abortion. They liked the idea that she would not have to be pregnant in her home town, that she'd be safe from prying eyes and nosy busybodies, that their daughter would be supervised and have counseling to help her with the emotions of her predicament. They liked the idea that there would be little disruption to their own lives and plans.

They saw a way out.

And that is what happened. My friend went to the Edna Gladney Home, had her baby, met the baby's adoptive parents, and returned home to her grateful parents. Changed lives for two families, and a loving, Godly outcome.

The poster above is a Ron Paul quote. When I saw it,  it reminded me of this event in my youth. My friend's baby is in their late 30s now, perhaps with children and maybe even grandchildren of their own. Many generations of love were made possible by my friend's courage and love for her baby.

Young women and young men, you are never too young to teach your elders how to respect life. Put Pro-Life Posters in your room, give them as gifts to your friends, talk with the adults around you, remind them that science says every conception is a baby, and God says every baby is a blessing. "Teach your parents well."

A baby raised in the home of adoptive parents has double the love: the love of his birth mother who gave him life and offered him to God by placing him in the arms of a grateful mother-in-waiting, and the love of his adoptive mother who every month for years prayed and hoped and longed for THIS child to love with all her heart.

What other things can one of us do to help a person in our neighborhood find the love they need to choose life?  Please share your thoughts in the comments! (PS: I accept anonymous comments here when they are loving, and loving privacy in these matters is very important).