Georgina
Every morning after waking, Georgina listed her goals. What could she do that day to keep babies from dying at their mothers’ hands? She’d get her bowl of cereal, a cup of tea, and she’d sit down with a pen and paper at the kitchen table where she made her plans.
The fight to end abortion meant everything, although she’d shared with no one just why she’d devoted her life to the cause. Of course, much of her devotion stemmed from her religious beliefs. The Lord Jesus wanted her to do this work, and He was the only one who should have the power of life and death.
Then there was her secret reason.
She’d had an abortion, and then when she wanted to have a child with her husband, she couldn’t.
She’d been just eighteen. She’d had the abortion because she would have been disgraced in the church and unable to face anyone she knew. She might have even wound up homeless.
She should have known better, but she had been young. And stupid.
It happened at the end of her senior year. She’d seen the boy at school, and he’d been cute and funny. She’d sat next to him in English class, and he made her laugh. She had been pretty in those days, so she shouldn’t have been surprised when he asked her out. But she had been. Surprised. And excited.
Her parents disapproved of dating, so she’d lied and told them she was going to a friend’s to study.
Three weeks later, in the back of his car, she’d sinned. And then she sinned again three or four times more in the next month.
She realized she was pregnant when her period was late, and then she took a pregnancy test, sitting in a stall at the local McDonald’s. When she told her boyfriend that they had to get married, he refused.
“I’m going to college. Maybe we’ll get married eventually, but not this way.” Then he’d told her that it was no big deal. Lots of girls had abortions. That he’d pay for it. He had money from a part-time job.
She had to leave town to do it—people from her church picketed the local clinics, but she’d come up with a lie, that her friend was going to look at a college in Houston and wanted her company. She did go to Houston—it was far away enough from Austin that she didn’t have to worry about being seen. Her boyfriend drove her there and paid for everything.
She had the abortion.
He went off to college, and she never saw him again. She had been heartbroken when he sent a brief letter in response to hers, telling her it was over, but she eventually realized that she was better off. That he wasn’t a man of worth.
The unborn baby was different.
It was something she atoned for every day. She’d killed her baby. Her child—she didn’t know if it had been a boy or a girl—would have been an adult by now. She could have had grandchildren.
After the abortion, she’d developed an infection, which the doctors had told her was a possibility, but that it was rare. And treatable. If it happened, she’d need to see a doctor and get antibiotics. But when she developed the fever and the stomachache, she didn’t tell go to the doctor, and she didn’t get treatment.
She’d married at twenty-two to a good Christian man who wanted a good Christian wife and lots of kids.
The doctor she went to secretly after five years of trying without conceiving had told her that her failure to get treatment for the infection after the abortion was the reason. But she knew it wasn’t just the infection. It was God punishing her.
She never told her husband why. Just the fact. She couldn’t have a baby.
He tried to be understanding, but he was deeply disappointed. The marriage failed after ten years, maybe because she couldn’t have children. Maybe because he got tired of her. Maybe because she closed herself off from him, out of guilt or fear.
The end of the marriage hadn’t bothered her all that much. She’d inherited money and rental property from her parents, and she’d invested well. Her husband wasn’t as important as the child she’d never have.
Now she fought to keep the same thing from happening to other women. To keep them from waking up in their fifties without children and without husbands, because God had punished them for murdering their babies.
Like he’d punished her.
But she was serving Him now. And she always remembered the baby she’d killed. This is for you, too, my darling. Remembering gave her strength and purpose.
But there were people who wanted to stop her. Who didn’t see the righteousness of what she was doing. Who rejected God’s gift of life.
Like she once did.
All of that ran through her mind when the police officer stopped by her house to tell her that a detective had scoped out her backyard in the middle of the night. A woman private detective. Claimed to be working for client with an unfaithful husband. The officer said that it seemed to be a matter of a mistaken address.
She knew it wasn’t a mistake.
They were trying to stop her.
She thanked the officer. After he left, she examined the lock on the garage. There were scratches around the lock that she didn’t remember being there earlier. Had the officer not stopped by, she wouldn’t have given it a second look or thought. Now that she did, she was suspicious.
Someone had picked the lock.
Someone, she remembered, had planted a bomb under the car of an abortionist doctor who’d died when he turned on the engine. It was something that she should have felt sad about, one life gone. But how many lives had he taken? How many lives had been saved by one act of violence?
She preferred stopping abortion through legal means, but she didn’t disapprove of any means to stop it. That was why she liked John Petersen so much. She didn’t know that he was the one who planted bombs at clinics, although she suspected it, but she knew that he was as devoted as she was to saving the lives of the innocent. However it had to be done.
But had someone tampered with her car?
The thought terrified her. The baby killers were scary these days. Who knew what lengths they might go to?
But she wasn’t stupid, and she wasn’t naive. They’d have to try harder.
She walked back into the house and upstairs to her bedroom where she found a hand mirror. In the kitchen, she taped the mirror to the end of a broom.
Then she returned to the garage.