It’s true. I got arrested, hand-cuffed, and hauled away in a police car. And I’d do it again.
It was 1980-something, I was a teenager, and there was a new movement on the rise to fight against the killing of unborn children. I pretended that I was a teenager going to an abortion clinic to have an abortion but instead ended up being one of a large group of people staging a sit-in in an effort to shut the place down. I was, along with the others, arrested for this.
You see I believe in the sanctity of human life. I believe that life begins at conception and no one has the right to snuff out that innocent life for any reason. I believe that children need to be protected since they are unable to protect themselves. And I share this story as part of a blog series shaped around 10 things you didn’t know about me. So now know you know #1: I have a criminal past.
In the years following my arrest, I came to see that while our efforts were well-intended, I could better make a stand against the devaluing of all human life by working with scared, pregnant girls faced with tough decisions. This led to years of working as a volunteer at a local crisis pregnancy center where young women showed up or called, with nowhere else to turn, looking for shelter, care, and options. Many of these girls had been locked out of their homes, had runaway, or were kicked to the curb by guys they had mistakenly believed had loved them. On several occasions I would bring a young woman home to stay with us until we could find a more permanent solution for her. We, as a family, helped these girls find medical care, clothing, baby items, housing, jobs and more. This way of living was not new to me as a young adult for I had grown up in a family that had done this for as long as I could recall. My parents gave shelter to so many people over the course of my lifetime I could write a book about it.
In the late 1990s my husband and I received a call from an adoption attorney in our state asking if we were interested in adopting a baby. Or two. At that particular time, they were working with two different birth moms that had chosen life for their babies and had elected to relinquish for adoption. The attorney did not know of any adoptive parents, at that specific time, that were willing to take on either of these two special needs infants. Mike and I agreed to adopt them both.We were in the middle of building our house at that time, a project we were actually doing ourselves. It was not a good time to have a baby, especially two. But these little ones needed a family. The birthmothers had chosen life. We could set down our hammers and trowels and fill that void.The necessary paperwork and multitude of hoops to jump through to make it possible to adopt in our state were completed in record time. The babies were born, and then both birthmothers decided to keep their babies.
It was nearly a year later when the adoption attorney called us again and asked if we could meet him at the local hospital in 4 hours. If we were still interested, he had a newborn baby girl waiting for us whose birthmother had chosen adoption and specifically selected us to be her baby’s adoptive parents. Four hours later, we held all 5 lbs of her. Hurriedly, en route to the hospital, we picked the name Halla. It is an African name meaning “unexpected gift,” perfect for this tiny gift that was completely unexpected.
A few years later we learned of another little girl that needed a mommy and a daddy. I listened with pride to my husband as he, without hesitation, said we needed to give this child a family.
Our home has always been open to strangers needing respite from the harsh realities of life and a bit of guidance to get back on their feet. Sometimes our guests are addicted to drugs or dealing with trauma or just angry at the world. Nothing about it is pleasant or easy. But, if we believe in the sanctity of human life how can we ignore the knock on the door?
Our world is so full of self-centeredness and looking out for #1. It permeates our society to a degree that it has become customary to do what is easy rather than what is right. It has become so cliched to say we believe things when our actions do not back up our words. It is okay to devalue human life if it is, even just a little bit, inconvenient. This makes me angry. So I do what I can to live out my belief that human life is sacred even when it’s inconvenient. Even if it means I get handcuffed and hauled away to jail.