Faces of Abortion

Photo taken by Sidewalk Counselor John Barros

In 1973, two U.S. Supreme Court decisions, Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton, radically changed the legal landscape of American abortion law.

The combined effect of the rulings required abortion to be:

• Legal for any reason, regardless of age.

• Legal for any reason during the first six months of pregnancy, and for virtually any reason thereafter.*

Kelly Clinger, former background vocalist for Britney Spears and current spokesperson for the Silent No More Awareness Campaign, shares her recent personal experience with these legal rulings outside an abortion clinic in Florida.

“When I first started visiting the sidewalks of abortion clinics to pray and minister, I had NO idea that late term abortions were even legal. I remember hearing about the Partial Birth Abortion Ban in 2007 and assumed (like most) that this stopped abortions late in a woman’s pregnancy.

Shock can’t even begin to describe my feeling when I first counseled on late term day. “These girls are SO pregnant”, I kept thinking to myself. Of course that’s silly since there’s no such thing as being a “little pregnant”, but I couldn’t get over the size of their beautiful bellies so full of LIFE. These women have felt their babies kick. Many of them even know the sex of the child and this is sometimes the reason for the abortion. These girls have carried these babies for 6 months. They are more than halfway done!

I just cried and cried. I couldn’t even speak at first. Not only is the size of their bellies overwhelming but the hardness of their hearts is just as shocking. I began to think about family members, friends, and co-workers of these girls who know they are pregnant. Is our society so lacking of accountability that they will return to their lives and no one will think this is a problem?

This past Wednesday my friend John posted a picture of a girl who arrived at OWC to abort her twin baby girls. She already had daughters and didn’t want anymore. She was about 20 weeks along, but because she was pregnant with twins, she had a BIG belly. Within a few hours, the picture went viral. I began to get phone calls & emails from friends who had no idea this was going on. Many offered financial help and MANY offered to adopt her babies. Thousands of people all of over the world were praying that this girl would change her mind…and thousands were saying the picture was a hoax or that what she was doing was illegal.

I found myself repeating over and over again, “Abortion is legal in America up to the day you give birth.”

…

The girl I mentioned earlier ended up aborting the twin girls in her womb even though we had every kind of help she would ever need ready for her. She admitted that she didn’t want girls and that she had no compassion for the babies she was carrying. Through a 2 day process, she actually had to go into labor and deliver her sweet babies into a toilet. Abortions like these happen ALL over the country EVERYDAY.”

More than 50 million pre-born children have lost their lives to abortion since 1973.

Read Kelly's blog in it's entirety: http://kellyclinger.com/2012/08/11/we-cant-handle-the-truth-about-abortion/

*“Status of Abortion Laws in the United States”, 2010 Sanctity of Human Life Guide, Focus on the Family, p. 30.