A Memorial to the Unborn

This past weekend I had an opportunity to visit our nation's capital again and do some sightseeing.  I have been to Washington DC a number of times in the past and have visited most of the the memorials and museums. There was however, one memorial that I had never seen in person before mostly due to my ignorance.  This was the Vietnam Memorial. I had never made a point to see this memorial because, to be honest, I thought that it looked kinda silly. I mean, it's just a big wall with names on it... at least that's how I used to think of it.

Yes, it is still a large black wall with names on it, but it is so much more and it is something that one should experience in person because pictures do not do it justice.  When you walk up to this memorial there are three things that hit you. 1.) The length and height of the wall 2.) All the individual names on the wall and 3.) The silence of nearly everyone around you.

It was a very somber experience to walk the length of that wall and see each of the names of those who died in the war. The names and the size of the wall really made me realize the loss of life during that point in our history. All of those brave men who fought for our country to protect freedom. Reading the numbers on a page in a book or newspaper just do not effect you the same way and obviously everyone else there was feeling the same thing based on their silence. 

Then that made me think, "What if we built a memorial to all of the unborn children who have had their lives taken from them before they even had the chance to look upon this world?" 

The length of the Vietnam War Memorial is 493.5 ft long and includes the names of 58,272 soldiers from the US who died or are missing. So, I ran some numbers to see what a similarly designed memorial would look like if it had the names (or something to symbolize those children which would take up the same amount of space as a name) of every aborted child in the USA since Roe v. Wade in 1973. With over 57 million names, this memorial would stretch roughly 91.5 miles in length. And this just includes those aborted legally in the US since Roe v. Wade. That is long enough to go around Manhattan 3 times over, give or take a few miles. I don't mean to belittle what happened in Vietnam,  but just want to take the number "57 million" and make it more concrete, as the Vietnam War Memorial did for me and many others who have visited this sight.