A few times this summer I stood with a friend on the approved scrap of weeds between the highway and the parking lot to pray. After a while it occurred to me that this was the closest I was ever going to get to witnessing anything like the crucifixion. You stand there, helpless, grieving, and there isn’t anything you can do but just go on standing. Everyone is going to do what they have already purposed to do.

I wrote something fluffy and inconsequential yesterday, before the news broke that the New York State Senate easily voted to extend abortion rights to full-term mothers, and to condemn babies who survive the ordeal to death anyway. You can watch the Senate applauding themselves here. As an act of mourning—and anger that the March for Life was eclipsed by the manufactured controversy of a lot of people who survived childbirth insulting each other on the steps of the Lincoln Memoria—I am reposting something from November 2017. I gave it a much needed edit and shortened it up. Nov 2017, you might remember, was in the throes of the early moments of #metoo. So let me add an additional lamentation and express my bitterness over another squandered moment. Too bad we don’t really care about the lives of women—of every race and creed and tongue and nation—here in New York. May God have mercy.

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There are a lot of planned parenthood clinics around here, and not all of them do abortions. But they refer women, daily and relentlessly, to a low slung “clinic” hunched on the side of the highway, its graying boxlike shape and drabness marked out by that ironical name Pregnancy Services.

A few times this summer I stood with a friend on the approved scrap of weeds between the highway and the parking lot to pray. After a while it occurred to me that this was the closest I was ever going to get to witnessing anything like the crucifixion. You stand there, helpless, grieving, and there isn’t anything you can do but just go on standing. Everyone is going to do what they have already purposed to do.

And the thing that stunned me, of course, was how many women went in under the ‘help’ of another—usually a man, sometimes a mother. Chivalry suddenly wasn’t dead as strong young gentlemen got out of their cars and went all the way round to open the door of the lady, to take her elbow and propel her across the uneven and pockmarked pavement.

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