SCHARF: Kindness for own members? North County Times
The "40 Days for Life" anti-abortion campaign began this week. A coalition of San Diego County Church groups plan to stage a Lenten vigil outside the Palomar Pomerado Medical building in San Marcos.
It seems benign, without aggressive tactics such as thrusting pictures of aborted children in people's faces or yelling like I've seen done in other demonstrations. The organizers claim that 2,000 women have thanked them for changing their minds, and if this is true, well, it's certainly a good thing. I would imagine there are some women who don't look on their abortions as tragic errors in judgment, but I haven't met any.
The picture accompanying last week's article showed a group of seventh-graders on the line during a previous year's demonstration, but I'm hoping they weren't there during the days that the abortions were being performed. If the demonstrators truly want to represent themselves as someone women can reach out to, only adults should be present.
But their presence brings up an interesting point.
According to a study quoted by Focus on the Family, 1 out of 5 women undergoing an abortion were evangelical Christians. So even those who claim to be against abortion are having them.
Hypocrites? Maybe, but maybe not.
I've known one woman who came from a fundamentalist Christian family and, as a teen, had an abortion because she could not bring herself to tell her parents that she was pregnant. She had planned to hold onto her virginity until marriage, and being a little too confident in her ability to resist temptation, she was unprepared in terms of contraception.
