Abortion

 

“Mark every death. Remember every victim”

By Dave Andrusko
Perhaps you’ve seen the headlines about the tragic carnage that ensued last week in Chicago, especially over the holiday weekend.
“Fourteen people were shot to death last week throughout Chicago,” wrote the Chicago Sun Times’s Michael Lansu this past Monday. “Nine of the murders happened during the three-day holiday weekend, when at least 60 other people shot and wounded. Additionally, man and woman were fatally shot early Monday. Their identifies have not yet been released.” (An unfortunate update: two people shot over the weekend have died, raising the total to 16.)

“By the administration’s own tally, one person has been killed and five people have been shot, on average, every day this year in Chicago—and that was before the carnage over the Fourth of July weekend,” according to Tom Bevan of Real Clear Politics. (Bevan is based in Chicago. )
Lansu’s title? “Homicide Watch Chicago Editor.”

As it happens, moments after I read Lansu’s piece, I ran across a story on MPR (Minnesota Public Radio–we’re from Minnesota and old loyalties remain strong) about what the Chicago Sun-Times is doing to fulfill “its promise to treat every homicide in the city as something other than a rote, run-of-the-mill story.”

Each death is reported on. We read of lives lost, families devastated, communities uprooted—all intended to remind us that no man is an Island, no death is a mere statistic.
If you look (as I just did) at the latest stories from Homicide Watch Chicago (“Mark every death. Remember every victim. Follow every case”), they begin with a father talking about the shooting death of his daughter; the charging of a man accused of killing a woman last month; “A South Side mother of five was shot and killed in an apparent drive-by shooting early Wednesday on the Dan Ryan Expressway — less than a year after a younger brother died the same way, family of the dead woman said.”

An earlier story, alluded to by MPR, is of a photographer who approached a young man whom he hoped was alive. But when Vincent Johnson approached the 17 year old, he  “was motionless with his big eyes staring up into the rain.”

Johnson continued:

“When I first walked out the door, a part of me thought about going back inside and getting my camera. But I remembered what a great teacher once told me, ‘You’re a human first and a photojournalist second.’”

MPR’s Bob Collins put it this way:

“We are not challenged anywhere near enough by

journalists

to remember that there are more victims of this violence than the ones who die.” You, of course, already know where I am headed. What if the stories of every one of the more than 3,000 lives sacrificed to the idols of the Abortion Industry each day was detailed with such care and indignation?

We would learn of all the enormous potential lost when the little ones are thrown into the maw of the killing machine.
We would be reminded that this child had a mother and a father, grandparents and cousins, and often siblings. Delusionary pro-abortionists notwithstanding, each one of those lives is touched by that child’s passing.

Of all the sad stories I have heard over the years, perhaps none ever got to me that way accounts of siblings learning to their horror that their parents had aborted one of their brothers or sisters.
We would learn (often to our utter amazement) how often “choice” is a cruel misrepresentation. How many young girls are impregnated by older men or are pressured by family to “get rid” of the baby; how often had she received any encouragement, she would have carried that little baby to term.
When the slaughter is the magnitude of abortion, we need to pray each day for every mother, every child, every family facing a crisis pregnancy. We can pray that those utterly dependent lives will not be lost but if they tragically are, that somehow we can reach out to help everyone who was a party–either by commission or omission– to that loss.

We seek to help mothers and fathers heal not because this in any way lessens the value of the life loss, but because we realize we are all fallible and that we so desperately want to help that woman not make another decision for death over life.

There are many reasons the repeat abortion rate is well over 40%.
Let’s never allow failing to reach out to women and men be one of the reasons.

Source: NRLC News