Abortion

Read Part 1.

Keri: I know that you and Vitaliy both have a lot of ministries going on and you had talked earlier on about your nurse midwife dream and I’d like you to tell the listeners about how the Lord is bringing some of that to fruition in your life now.

Anne: That desire to be a midwife has never really left me. You know it goes under the water for a while but it always resurfaces. It’s like it follows me. About two years ago I started studying to be a doula and childbirth educator. I started studying with a Christian organization called Charis Childbirth. I never really saw how I could do it here because birth here is kind of a mystery for me. I knew women usually have horrible experiences, but it was hard to get any real details and to really know what it looked like. But I started studying this class and through women in my church, I started teaching them childbirth preparation classes. Then I was able to accompany them at their births.

That has been a major eye opener—seeing an actual birth in a birth house. Other women choose to have home births and I have watched how those things happen. The women in my church, and the husbands too, have been so thankful for this ministry that is unique and something that not very many people do. They are so happy to be having happy birth experiences.

Now I’m starting to get clients who are not Christians, and it has been wonderful to have chances to witness to them. Lately, I’ve been working with a couple from Belgium. They are English speakers. Vitaliy and I went out to dinner with them and he presented the gospel to them. It’s neat how childbirth is such an open time in people’s lives. Being educated about it and serving people makes them so open to listen to you about any area of life. It has made people really open to the Lord. I’m really thankful for that.

Keri: So, Anne, I’m excited to talk to you. This is the first time we’ve ever spoken.

Anne: I’m excited to be here with you!

Keri: I told Anne she was my guinea pig, because I’ve never done an interview on my blog before. Why don’t you tell us just a little bit about how a girl went from Chattanooga and ended up in the Ukraine?

Anne: When I was in high school we had a lot of missionaries come in and out of our church. That was also the time when the wall of Communism fell in Eastern Europe. I’d heard a lot of things about Russia and the former Soviet Union, and my dream became—well, let me back up a little bit. I had a lot of other interests. I was also interested in the pro-life movement and I was involved in that in my hometown. I also wanted to be a nurse midwife. That was my dream.

So I combined all these things, and I wanted to be a missionary in Russia and help women who were having abortions because there was such an astronomical abortion rate in Russia. My dream was to have a home for women who were in crisis pregnancies and I would be their midwife and help them be able to work, go to school, and not have to abort their babies. This was my whole dream.

On January 20 of this year, Barack Obama was sworn in as the 44^th President of the United States of America. This momentous occasion did not mark the death of racism in our land. It did, however, betoken a crucial stage in the sluggish uprooting of racism’s influence upon this nation. It is no small matter that the majority of voting Americans in the election resolved to appoint an African-American to the highest office in the land—arguably to the most powerful governmental post on the planet. This marks a groundbreaking advance toward an America in which one’s abilities and opportunities are wholly disentangled from levels of melanin in one’s skin—toward an America in which citizens of every class and ethnicity share equal status as creatures made in the image of God.

Just days before Obama’s November 4 victory at the polls, I made a rather timely visit to two museums. Each of these museums preserves on display the viewpoint of onetime purveyors of a societal vision that hinged on the perceived inferiority of a specific class of people. The Gettysburg Museum in Pennsylvania and the Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C. each immortalizes the convictions of sincere intellectuals who sought to elevate one segment of society by oppressing another.

Alexander H. Stevens, Vice President of the Confederate States of America, declared that the “cornerstone” of the Confederacy “rests upon the great truth that the Negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and moral condition.” In the hallowed halls of the U.S. Senate on March 4, 1858, Senator James Henry Hammond of South Carolina proclaimed: “Our slaves are black, of another and inferior race.”

Countering such sentiments, Abraham Lincoln declared in a debate at Galesburg, Illinois (October 7, 1858): “I confess myself as belonging to that class in the country who contemplate slavery as a moral, social and political evil …” In a letter to Albert Hodges, Lincoln wrote: “If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.”

Consider this carefully: These two radically distinct ideologies were vehemently defended and publicly debated by sincere Americans. Mercifully, the viewpoint that eventually prevailed insisted that oppressing one class of people to protect the status of another was not only evil, but degrading to the protected class—a thesis Booker T. Washington ably championed in his autobiography, Up from Slavery. The presidency of Barak Obama rides on the wings of this achievement.