The Day I Ceased Being A "Liberal"

I wrote this in 1995, when I was still a Christian.  And when I still used the word 'liberal' incorrectly.  So don't give me any guff about the part where God speaks to me, or about being inconsistent with my use of the "L word."

Some people have asked me for this story; so I have copied & pasted it from my personal archives, with the only change being a corrected typo.

The Day I Ceased Being a Liberal

by Ken Barber

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One of the big turning points in my life came in 1978 when I was a refrigeration repairman in Portland, Oregon. I had been what is now called a "fundamentalist" Christian for almost four years. Prior to that conversion I had been heavily involved in the radical counterculture (from which sprang all of today's Liberal constituencies), and had abandoned most of the beliefs of that movement save one: I still held stubbornly to the adage that "a woman has the right to control her own body," and that a woman's decision to abort was no one else's business.

Then came that fateful day when my employer sent me to a place called the "Lovejoy Specialty Hospital" to fix a refrigerator. It never occurred to me to ponder just what their "specialty" was: I was fixating on the strangeness of the word "Lovejoy" in their name. It turned out that they were on Lovejoy Street. Mystery solved. I went right to work.

This was a household-type refrigerator, and the problem was in the automatic defrost circuit. In this particular model, that meant doing all my work in the freezer compartment (this was a two-door model with the freezer on top), where there was a large buildup of ice. This was going to take some time.

I tend to bury myself in my work and not pay any attention what is going on around me. Slowly, it began filtering into my consciousness that women were being brought into the room I was in, one by one, and asked, "when was the first day of your last period?"

Finally, curiosity got the better of me, and I turned around and asked a nurse, "Do you only treat women here?"

"Yes," came the reply. "We're an abortion clinic."

"Oh! That's cool," I thought, proud of my liberal open-mindedness on this controversial issue. I expressed my approval to the nurse and went back to work.

After getting all the ice out and finding the cause of the problem, I found that I didn't have the right part on my service truck. The usual procedure in this case was to get the part on order and return within a week: once de-iced, the refrigerator would work fine for about that long. I wrote down the part number and left the abortion clinic, oblivious to the fact that not once had I opened the door to the refrigerator compartment; neither had I given any thought to what might be stored in there.

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WARNING! The rest of this story is NOT light reading. If you have recently eaten, or if you have a sensitive stomach, you may experience nausea if you continue. This story is important, and I urge all who can to continue, but please understand that you do so at your own risk.

I returned a few days later to the abortion clinic with the part for their refrigerator and, once again, began tearing apart the freezer compartment to finish the repair. This time, the repair was quickly completed and I began to walk away from the refrigerator to get a signature on the bill. I had done the entire job without ever once opening the door to the refrigerator compartment. It had never occurred to me to do so; nothing that I needed was in there.

Then, suddenly, I remembered that I was supposed to write the refrigerator's model and serial number onto every bill. I often forgot to do this part, and had already received several verbal warnings from my boss about it. I hated going through all the rigamarole, but finally decided that I had better take the time to do it.

The nameplate for this particular refrigerator is inside the refrigerator compartment, on the side wall. You have to pull out the left-hand vegetable drawer to get to it.

Grumbling at my boss' pickiness, I opened the refrigerator door for the first time during my entire time there -- and -- this is difficult to write about -- there they were. Right there on the top shelf. Little plastic bags a little larger than your fist, filled with watery blood, sealed, with a label on each one bearing the mother's name. Realizing what I was seeing, I recoiled in horror and closed the door, deciding that my boss could do without his stupid model and serial numbers this time.

And then I heard the voice of the Lord speaking to me. Few events in my life have changed me as dramatically or as permanently, and even fewer are as indelibly imprinted in my memory. He said, "No, Ken. Open that door again, and take a good, long look. I don't want you to ever forget what you see here."

I have disobeyed God many times since then, but in one thing I have complied with His word: I have never forgotten that sight, nor am I ever likely to. Exercising enormous self-control, I opened the door again. I looked at the little bags with the labels and contemplated how the names on them should be the names of the dead babies within them, rather than the names of their mothers. I thought about how those bags were on their way to the state pathology lab to be tested for malignancy, as state law required in those days for any "growth" that was removed from a human. Then I looked closer, and realized there were things floating around inside them: little pieces of chopped meat, and little pieces of something white that looked like bone. I presume the white pieces were cartilage.

It was on that day, at that moment, that I ceased being a liberal.

Many years have elapsed since then, and a long time passed before I could tell this story to anyone. It has taken even longer to be able to write about it. I cry every time I think about it, about those poor innocent little ones brutally chopped to pieces, without a chance to love or laugh or play. I am crying now as I write this.

This, friends, is the reality of abortion. Forget all the talk about "choice." Forget about "reproductive rights." All of that is doublespeak to avoid the grisly reality that the "choice" being made is over another's life or death, and that the true "reproductive right" is the right to say "No" to someone wanting to have sex with you.

No nation that permits such a ghastly holocaust can long endure. This is America's darkest hour.