I’ve been involved in the pro-life movement long enough to see progress and regress, setbacks and positive developments. Here’s a story of God using many active Christians of various churches to bring about a positive change.
For 23 years, the Aastra Women’s Center in Fort Lauderdale was committed to killing unborn babies. Surgical abortions cost about $800, and the clinic never seemed to lack any business.
Countless preborn lives were snuffed out at this clinic. But things have changed lately.
It began with the daily pro-life presence of sidewalk counselors outside Aastra. And then the church got involved, several years ago, thanks to Love Life, a nationwide pro-life group that mobilizes the church to pray outside abortion facilities.
Love Life led the mobilization on Saturday mornings of peaceful, prayerful Christians engaged in prayer walks on public property, adjacent to the parking lot of this abortion facility. We prayed for an end to abortion. About 50 churches, including the one where I serve, participated in these peaceful prayer walks. Later, that number increased to about 110 churches.
In the parking lot of a nearby church, a group of several people (about 20-30) people would worship, pray and hear a short pro-life message. On the three occasions when our congregation participated, I had the opportunity to deliver the message.
After we prayed, we would all walk as a group a couple of blocks away – usually in the blistering heat – to a place near the parking lot of the abortion facility.
There, in a nice cul-de-sac by the facility’s parking lot, we would pray for the clinic to stop killing babies. We would pray for the mothers who were seeking to have their babies killed in abortion. We would pray for the staff at the clinic that their eyes would be opened as to what they were doing – the deliberate destruction of preborn children. Thankfully, there are many in our time who have left the abortion field because their eyes were opened to the grisly work they have been doing in killing these unborn babies.
Also, we would pray for the Church at large to be mobilized. And we would pray that the day would come when this clinic would close down.
That day has now come. Whether because of our efforts, the enactment of Florida’s heartbeat bill, other factors, or all of the above, this facility has closed up shop as an abortion chamber.
Furthermore, Love Life has now acquired the building, cleaned it up and is now using it to provide loving alternatives to abortion. This is an amazing story.
I recently got to walk through the repurposed facility where the offices of the abortion personnel have been converted to offices of Love Life leaders Ezra and Shannon Deane.
Ezra says that sometimes women seeking abortions will still come to the facility, thinking they can still “terminate their pregnancy” there. Some of these walk-ins have been persuaded to allow their baby to be born after all. Ezra says that so far this year, 65 babies overall have been saved from abortion by the work of Love Life in South Florida, including in such cases.
The facility looks so peaceful today. A couple of rooms are overflowing with donated diapers for living babies, spared from abortion – as well as donated baby clothes, car seats and other gifts.
Abortion is one of the hot-button issues of our day. Some battles we win; some battles we lose. I am encouraged to see the right to life honored in this particular case. A sign in the newly repurposed facility sums up this story. It declares, “We are now closed because of the mobilization of the local church.”
When I see this facility – formerly, a killing zone, but now a life-giving center – I think of a paraphrase of what Joseph said in the Bible, What you meant for evil, God meant it for good.
Abortion is incompatible with the ideals by which our nation was founded. The reason America was born in the first place is spelled out with theological lucidity in our nation’s birth certificate, the Declaration of Independence. The founders believed that there is such a thing as “self-evident” truths. The most important of these truths is that our rights come from the Creator.
Furthermore, the Creator has made us equal and has endowed us with our rights.
And the first of these rights spelled out is the right to life. But in the last half-century, the abortion ethic has been at war with the right to life. Although there have been many setbacks in the attempt along the way to combat the abortion ethic, it’s encouraging to see this recent victory on this front in Broward County, Florida.