Informed heartache or ignorant bliss?

I’m torn between staying informed about the Gosnell trial, and avoiding further heartache and tears.  When I first started reading about the case, all my horror was focused on the babies who were murdered.  How they were born alive and breathing, moving little babies who were killed by scissors cutting through their spinal cords.  It made me literally sick.

Then, the more I read and the further I dug, I started seeing accounts from former “patients” of the clinic.  One woman described how she waited for hours with the intention of having an abortion, but after seeing the conditions of the clinic on her way to the operating room, she started having second thoughts.  After being prepped, she told the staff that she couldn’t go through with the abortion, but Gosnell banged on her legs and told her to stop being a baby.  When she woke up she didn’t know where she was but knew she wasn’t pregnant anymore.  Now, years later, she is unable to conceive because of the damage done to her body during the forced abortion.  I read about former employees – some just teenagers when they started working there – and the horrific things they had to witness and often times participate in.  There were always explanations for why they must do whatever Gosnell was asking of them, but a lot of them still felt extremely uncomfortable and “squeamish” performing the acts.  There were stories of employees who ran out of the clinic to never return. 

                 

Maybe I’m just extra sensitive right now because I’m carrying a baby inside me, but reading these stories, one after another, of the bone-chillingly disturbing events that took place at this clinic, I couldn’t help but cry.  Not only because of the sadness that I felt for all the babies, but for the women who went to the clinic and some of the employees who worked there.  Can you even imagine how helpless and DESPERATE a woman must feel to 1) consider an abortion in the first place and 2) actually HAVE the abortion in such a dreadful place?  She must truly feel that there is no other option.  Going into the clinic, she probably felt powerless, abandoned, possibly taken advantage of and abused, maybe embarrassed.  Walking away from the clinic, there is no possible way that she felt empowered, cared for, or in any way less abused or broken.  And that’s after she came out of the drug-induced stupor.  And how many of these women had abortions there at a young age and later married, only to discover that her body had been mangled beyond repair, deeming her sterile, because of this man and his recklessness? 

                 

Can you imagine the guilt that some of the employees at the clinic must be living with every day?  Although very few of them are completely innocent because very few reported any shady happenings, some surely knew what they were doing was wrong.  And the things that these people were made to witness!  I have a hard time clearing my mind’s eye of the images that I’ve only read about, much less live with the memories on a daily basis.  Clearly, some of them felt just as desperate for a job as the patients did for an abortion. 

The emotional, spiritual, and physical scars that these employees and patients are forced to live with are, to me, inconceivable.  The only solace that I can find in this whole situation is that all these babies were innocent, pure, and are now in a special place in God’s Kingdom.  One of the hardest aspects for me to swallow is the pain and despair that the living victims must be dealing with.  It’s so easy for me – a white girl, from a middle class family with an education, strong faith, financial stability, and loving family – to look at the girls and women who choose to have abortions and judge them.  To say, “You’re being selfish and not taking responsibility for your actions.”  It’s so easy for me to focus on the baby and rationalize that it wasn’t the baby’s fault.  Why should he/she be denied the right to live because of another person's mistake?  But, when I actually stop and think about the circumstances that might drive a woman to an abortion clinic, it’s impossible for me to feel anything but compassion and empathy for them.  Abortion is a traumatic and scaring thing in and of itself, but abortion in this horrific and morbid condition is beyond comprehension for a sheltered girl like me.

Why the media hasn’t covered the story?  That’s something that I’m having a hard time focusing on right now.  Yes, it’s upsetting, but not nearly as upsetting as the circumstances.  My prayer, of course, is always for an end to abortion.  But, right now, my prayer is one of healing for the poor, abused women who have to live with the reality of what this man did to them and, possibly, a far worse reality that lead them to Gosnell in the first place.