Pro-Life Protestors Push 40 Days for Life

Perhaps you’ve seen them along side Newman Springs Road on your way home from work, appearing regularly enough in front of the Shrewsbury Planned Parenthood center that you could easily mistake them for a part of the landscape, if not for the conspicuous signs they wear around their neck telling you not to abort your child in the name of Jesus.

This Saturday marks the culmination of 40 Days for Life, a national pro-life campaign aimed at ending abortion and protesting family planning centers in more than 300 locations throughout the country. It’s also an effort to promote unity among pro-lifers and reinvigorate the movement by maintaining a daily presence at facilities like the one in Shrewsbury.

On Wednesday afternoon, a small group gathered outside of the center, on a bit of sidewalk that fails to attract much pedestrian traffic, one holding a sign saying to consider adoption and another wearing one around his neck pleading to pregnant mothers: “please don’t murder your baby.”

When it comes to the message of the pro-life movement there’s not much subtlety in the delivery – one protestor carried a small and squishy rubber fetus designed to show expectant mothers what their child looks like at just a few months into the pregnancy – but then again why would there be, they say, this is after all a matter of life and death.

And, as much as the protestors want women to consider other options before abortion, like adoption, so too do they want to see centers like Planned Parenthood shut down, which they believe fail to offer mothers with information about all options available to them.

According to the Planned Parenthood website, the center not only provides abortion services, but birth control, STD testing and treatment, pregnancy testing and services, and women’s health services, like cancer screenings and routine physicals, among other things.

The inclusion of abortion among those other women’s health services is enough, however, to want to see it shut down.

“We want to close it down,” Middletown resident Robert Dow said. “We do believe that when abortion ends it will be like when the Berlin wall fell. It will all happen in one day.

“We’re here to witness publicly. People say you should pray privately, but this is a public sin that needs to be condemned publicly.”

Though there’s not much foot traffic, the protest, which the 40 Days foundation calls a vigil, is passed by thousands of drivers every day on their way to and from the Garden State Parkway. Dow said he and the group get plenty of favorable honks and waves, more so than the odd jeer or insult from drivers passing swiftly by.

The peaceful demonstration is intended only to inform the community, and, hopefully, sway women who may be considering abortion.

“Someone has to defend life. These are God’s babies,” Vera Imparato said. “Women who choose abortion have to live with that for the rest of their lives, and that’s not an easy thing to do.

“There are so many people out there who are looking to adopt. For some, this is the only way they can become parent.”

On the last day of the 40 Days effort, a public prayer and vigil will be held at St. Mary’s in the New Monmouth section of Middletown at 2:30 p.m. in the church’s chapel. For more information about 40 Days for Life, visit the organization’s website at http://www.40daysforlife.com/.