A few days ago, my wife, Nancy, was in our front yard, getting a receipt from a tradesman who had just finished some work. As she stood there, a young woman drove up, walked over to her, and handed her a handwritten note. Because Nancy was in a conversation, the young woman didn’t say anything, I assume because she was polite and didn’t want to interrupt. She then drove off.
When I stopped working for lunch, Nancy handed the note to me. Apparently, the young woman was a new arrival to town and had three sons, the youngest of whom is 4 years old. They were getting acquainted with Naperville and its many amenities. They also read the Naperville Sun.
One of the things they apparently enjoyed was the downtown library, which makes perfect sense to me. As a boy I spent many days in the old Nichols Library by Central Park, reading to the reassuring ticking of the old grandfather clock. And our youngest boy was in that bitter cold book brigade the day the last books were symbolically transferred from the old library to the new one.
But I’m not so sure the young woman likes the library any more. As they were walking into it one Saturday, there was apparently an anti-abortion rally going on, the kind with large graphic photographs and religious messages. If you have ever seen one, you know the images are horrifying, even sickening.
I’ve been told that’s the whole idea. The protesters feel terminating a pregnancy is a terrible thing to do, and that those gory, nauseating images are just getting that idea across. People have become complacent, say the anti-abortion people, and must be shocked into understanding how horrifying the process is.
Well, these are the kind of arguments one often hears in anti-abortion versus pro-abortion rights demonstrations on college campuses. And while everyone does have the right to make their opinions known, no one, in my experience, ever expects that one side will convince the other. While the legal argument has in fact been decided, the moral discourse will probably go on forever.
But not without serious consequences. As the young woman and her sons passed the signs, they found the images and what the pickets were saying very upsetting. Her two youngest began to cry, although it’s unlikely that they really understood what the rally was all about. Her oldest, in response to a sign that said “God hates sinners,” asked “Don’t we all sin?” Some more than others, young man. Some more than others.
Apparently the young woman has a relative with a heart condition serious enough that having a child would kill her. To her, the matter of abortion takes on a whole new dimension, and she struggles with it. The young woman wrote that she was glad her relative wasn’t with them that day.
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As regular readers know, I have occasionally recommended abortions when we’ve discovered, by genetic testing, very serious birth defects. Some of these are so disturbing that I’ve refused to describe them to the pregnant woman because of reports that just doing so has prompted suicides. As I said, in some circumstances, abortion takes on a whole other dimension.
Of course, this isn’t the first letter I’ve received about those graphic rallies. Far from it. Last year, a woman wrote me to say that her 6-year-old girl was so traumatized by one that they had to put her in therapy. She blames the city for not protecting her daughter. The young woman blames Nichols Library.
It just seems so unnecessary. Like those Westboro Baptist Church demonstrations, these gory rallies don’t seem to do any good and in fact appear to hurt the truly innocent. I have to believe we could handle the whole thing better if we tried. So let’s try.
Bill Mego is a freelance columnist for the Naperville Sun.