Life in the Gap

It’s time for our annual pro-life gut-check. Every year when the March for Life happens, I become suddenly painfully aware of all the ways I could be involving myself in this issue. Instead I make a lot of excuses and do very, very little. This year I’m not even able to march, so I can’t take advantage of my yearly feel-good, pro-life pick-me-up. I’m forced to face the brutal fact that I could and should be doing more.

Honestly, most of us, especially in the single, young adult category, could and should be doing more. It’s easy to think of abortion and other life issues as other people’s problems. It’s easy to hold fast to our personal convictions, to “tut-tut” the culture of death when it rears its ugly head in the news or in legislation, and then to leave it at that.

It’s easy to be afraid or weighed down by how massive the issue is, and how silent. If you’ve ever picketed outside an abortion clinic, you know: the grass grows under your feet, the birds sing, the cars roll by. You alone with your “Choose Life” poster strike the jarring note in all this normalcy, and the unseen awfulness that’s going on in the building behind you seems almost impossible.

It’s easy to leave the fight to smarter people, to people who aren’t afraid of getting shouted at or called names, to people who have more information or more time. No one wants to be on the receiving end of obscene gestures or called awful names and told they “hate women.” No one wants to be told, as I once was years ago, that they ought to “go to prison” for praying outside a clinic.

It’s easy to relegate the whole terrible issue to politics and the voting booth. With the constant, dizzying volley of stats and figures and slogans, it’s easy to lose sight of the humanity in it. It becomes a faceless issue. Yet as a friend recently reminded me, this is not a political thing. It’s a human thing.

This is not someone else’s problem. It touches all of us, and it’s up to all of us to do something about it. For myself, I plan on recommitting to a Saturday morning rosary outside a local clinic; it’s a place to start anyway. And I challenge all of you, especially my single peers without the additional time constraints of family, to commit to doing something—anything—to get involved as well. With nearly a third of our generation lost to abortion, this isn’t someone else’s problem–it’s our problem. So let’s do something about it.

Mary Beth Baker writes a bi-weekly feature entitled Life in the Gap. Mary Beth’s outstanding personal blog, also entitled Life in the Gap, is about a young woman’s daily journey “in between.” In between what? Between the single life and–whatever marvelous things God has in store. But far from being about a time of anxious waiting, Mary Beth’s reflections underscore the richness of living in the present moment. We know not only Generation Y’ers will enjoy following Mary Beth Baker’s Life in the Gap.