The time I sat next to an abortionist

When you are working or volunteering in the pro-life movement day in and day out, we can
easily get consumed by the big picture and lose sight of what is happening every day in the nation’s abortion mills. Working in the pro-life movement can sometimes make us too immune to the killing. We worry about money, politics, and metrics and we get bummed by our lack of sleep and time away from family.

But then you sit next to a late term abortionist…

Last Saturday, I was boarding a flight coming home to Virginia from Omaha, Nebraska. I had been in Kearney, speaking to students and local pro-life leaders and activists about creating a Culture of Life in their community and how we are all called to the pro-life movement. Oddly enough, a lot of people asked me that weekend how I keep up the schedule and the travel and where I get my passion and energy. It is the moments like what happened on my flight Saturday night, confronted by evil, that keep me going.

When I sat down and looked across the aisle, I saw none other than notorious late-term abortionist LeRoy Carhart, on his way to kill late-term babies at his facility in Germantown, MD. I was face-to-face with a man who has killed thousands upon thousands of babies with his own hands, who is responsible for the deaths of at least two women and who has so callously defended his business. And I had no idea what to do.

What do you really say to someone like that? How can you reach him?

I wasn’t sitting close enough to have a conversation with him (the aisle and a woman I assumed to be his wife were between us, but we were in the same row) and felt he would shut me down right away anyway. I knew I couldn’t sit that close to a man who represented so much evil. My entire body was shaking uncontrollably.

So, I asked to be moved up a couple rows where I couldn’t see him, but he could still hear me and I prayed out loud for his conversion and an end to abortion for the next two hours. When we landed, I waited for him to walk past and called his name. He looked me right in the eye and I said, “LeRoy, we’re all praying for you.” He mumbled something incomprehensible and stalked off, but I knew I had got to him.

I’m not the first pro-lifer to confront Carhart and hopefully I won’t be the last. Just as with any dialogue or conversation with an abortion-rights supporter, each of us is only responsible for planting or watering the seed, hoping and praying that it will one day bear fruit. We must continue to courageously reach out to those participating in the evil of abortion.

We might not know the impact that our actions will have and we might not see all the lives we affect. But we cannot forget what abortion is and what abortion does. We cannot forget that real lives and souls are at stake every day in our communities. We cannot let fear or intimidation stop us from acting. And we cannot rest until abortion is abolished from our nation.