I'm Claire, a secondary school teacher from Ireland. This is my second Summer volunteering with EMC. I arrived in NYC on Thursday. Yesterday, Friday was my first day back counselling and I've found the same thoughts and emotions resurfacing. I am reposting one of my blog entries from last year because of it's relevance, and I'll post again when I will have more days worked next week.
Conflicting and some seemingly incongruous ideas and associations abounded prior to my trip to New York and en route: New York, the city that never sleeps. The abortion capital of the world. Soho. Central Park. From Broadway to Roosevelt Avenue´s 12 abortion mills: New York´s very own baby death-row. Giuliani´s zero tolerance of yester-year versus the liberty to butcher babies in utero. ´In God we Trust´ printed on over a billion dollar bills exchanged for abortion. Bagels. Yellow cabs. Metropolis. Necropolis. The zenith of the Empire State Building and the nadir of modern ´civilisation´: the right to choose to have one`s own baby killed.
The trip itself raised mixed feelings for me. I absolutely wanted to go. It was however hard to reconcile a visceral desire to try to save mothers and babies from the horror of abortion with the anticipation of the adventure that living in NYC would be. I was very excited about New York but at the same time felt guilty about this, given the gravity of the work. How would I square the poignancy of the pregnancy centres with the wonder of the city??
New York: a teeming metropolis. `The city that never sleeps´. Why? People are too busy living. Living. Living life to the full! Yet, alongside this metropolis lurks a necropolis. That same sleepless city summarily sentences and violently dispatches babies to their sleep. NYC is the country´s abortion capital. No fewer than 250 abortuaries peddle their ghastly baby-dismemberment and baby-killing services. Metropolis. Necropolis. Metropolis. Necropolis. Metropolis. Necropolis. My brain struggled to make sense of it all. NYC is a majestic city. She is breath-taking but if you´re a babe in the womb, she can literally, and brutally, take your breath away.
The conflict persisted right up and into to the office block that houses one of our pregnancy centres in Brooklyn. There are views from our floor. Our centre overlooks a bustling commercial district. Nearby streets are leafy and balmy. Seemingly innocuously-named abortion clinics share the building with us and do their diabolical best to bludgeon babies to death on other floors of the building. One of the clinics is 3 floors directly beneath our centre. A few times already the elevator has stopped on these floors. Shivers permeated my body. I was staring at the face of evil. The good, the bad, the beautiful, the ugly and the evil interface in one building in NY, just as they co-exist in places the world over. Be it in our the pregnancy centres or outside the baby-killing facilities, we are on the front-line.
New York, New York, so good they named it twice. New York needs a renaissance – the French for re-birth - to be born again in humanity, dignity, truth and love. We have to reclaim New York. For life. The good news is that pro-lifers are informing, spreading the truth, praying, witnessing, counselling, making interventions, saving babies and sparing expectant mothers from abortion. We are bringing the city slowly back to life, one baby at a time. There can be great sorrow but there is great joy and hope also. In God we do, and will continue to trust. May God bless America y viva la vida!
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