No Nest on 73rd Street

By James Faris - Posted at Gentle Reformation:

"It’s August 6th 1975. You walk toward the bus stop. Your neighbors are waiting there. It’s all so familiar. All at once you step on something soft. Even through your shoe you have the sense of something unusual, something marked by a special “give”. Instinct pulls your foot away in an awkward little movement. You look down and see a tiny naked body. A bird you think, fallen from its nest. But…there is no nest on 73rd Street. No bird so big. It is rubber, then…a model…a joke. Yes, it’s a joke, and you bend to see it. Because you must, and it is no joke. It is a baby, and dead. You cover your mouth, your eyes. You are fixed. Horror has found its chink and crawled in, and you will never be the same as you were. Others come and you hear them speak with strangely altered voices. “Look,” they say. “It’s a baby.” “Here’s another!” And another! Yes, it’s true! There are more of these…little carcasses upon the street. Whatever smell there is in this place becomes for you the stench of death. The people of 73rd Street do not then speak to each other. It is too soon for outrage, too late blindness. It is the time of unresisted horror."

The release of video footage of Dr. Deborah Nucatola speaking of harvesting and selling body parts of aborted babies is horrendous. Yet, the yawn in response on the part of many is unsurprising. The video exposure caused me to think, “We’ve shown these kinds of things before. Yet, people have not been shaken.”

The event caused me to dig through my files for a speech I delivered in the 1995 Right to Life Oratory Contest. That speech which was delivered twenty years ago is copied below. It invoked the horror of a particular abortion incident twenty years before that. But, our culture was desensitized in 1975. It was desensitized in 1995. It remains desensitized in 2015. Sadly, bare knowledge of murderous practices and realities does not convict the heart of sin or move the soul to pursue justice.

That is not to say that we should cease from exposing the evil deeds of darkness; we must not cease. But, only the powerful work of the Holy Spirit will turn hearts of stone to hearts of flesh. To this end we must pray until we say as a nation with David of old, “Deliver me from bloodguiltiness, O God, O God of my salvation, and my tongue will sing aloud of your righteousness” (Psalm 51:14).

Read more here...