Grandfathers

So, two weeks ago I posted about a young mother who was being coerced into an abortion by a friend of her mother. I have good news. About 15 minutes after the police left, so did the girl, her mother, and the mother’s friend! They didn’t come talk to us, but there’s always a chance that we managed to save a life.

This weekend, a grandfather came to talk to us. His 17 year old granddaughter was at least 12 weeks pregnant. When her parents found out she was pregnant, they kicked her out of the house. Her boyfriend’s parents kicked him out of the house, too. The kicker being that her mother had her “out of wedlock.” The girl’s grandfather took her in. He was more than willing to support both her and the baby. But she went to court and got a waiver to have the abortion without her parent’s consent. I felt awful for him. You could see how much being there was tearing at him. He had driven her up from Mobile because she was too far along for them to take. He brought her up because he was afraid of further alienating her. He only talked to us briefly and he never did bring her out to speak to us.

Sidewalk counseling is fairly tedious. It’s a lot of standing around interrupted by brief periods of activity. Something that can almost be fun is to stand by the street with a “Honk if You’re Pro-Life” sign. If you tally up the positive and negative responses, you can get a weekly gauge of your community support. Plus, we’ve had people stop by with donations, which is always exciting.