Part one: Please read this full explanation first:
Dear Brothers and Sisters,
We have become dehumanized by a culture that permits abortion. When culture and law fail to consider the unborn as persons, not only are those children dehumanized, but so are those who kill them, and so are the rest of us.
We all need repentance and healing. We need to be re-humanized. (If you have had an abortion or lost a family member to abortion, you can find healing ministries at our special website www.AbortionForgiveness.com.)
Building a culture of life includes changing the way we all think, speak and act toward the children who are living in the womb, and those who died before birth. Together, we must learn to treat them as persons.
And something we all know is that every person has a name.
One of the very first things people do when meeting one another for the first time is that they let each other know their names. It would be strange indeed for someone to say, when we ask their name, “I don’t have one.”
Mourning the children who have been killed by abortion, remembering them, burying them (when we have their remains), and giving them a name, is part of the process of re-humanizing them, our society, and ourselves.
The first people, of course, who are entrusted with naming their children are the parents. In my role as Pastoral Director of both Rachel’s Vineyard and of the Silent No More Awareness Campaign, my team and I assist such parents who mourn the children they lost through abortion. Part of that grieving process is to name the children.
It is at that part of the healing process that, after they have thought about the death of their child, they begin to focus on the child’s life, and reclaim a spiritual relationship with that child, whom they have entrusted to the Lord.
Rachel’s Vineyard and many other ministries for healing after abortion carry out this important work each day. And when the parents are not interested in such a process, sometimes other family members step forward to grieve and name the children: grandparents, siblings, and other relatives of these babies.
Some 65 million children in the United States alone have been killed by abortion since 1973, and that number does not by any means count them all. Countless hundreds of millions of others have been killed by abortion throughout the world.
And most of these children will never be given names by their family members. They have been completely abandoned. And we have all been made less in the process.
That’s why we all can and should be part of the process of re-humanizing these children, and ourselves. And this project gives us a chance to do that by giving the children a name.