I hear the non-sound of NPR more as dead air with an occasional dead opinion rattling out without echo. Rather than atmosphere, I perceive it as deep space approaching perfect vacuum. It has been long since I listened to the sounds comprising "Left Wings Considered."
Speaking of chia, one sound that sticks is that of a very sleepy sounding John Edwards (I think) in desperate need of five cups of real coffee or even strong tea. Once again it has been a long time since I accidentally touched an NPR channel, although in Canada, I found some remarkably close copies with their CBC, I think it is.
The pregnancy-center clinic, with its new ultrasound machine, has been open only since December, but already the staff can count the women who came in considering an abortion and changed their minds: five women converted, six lives saved, they declare, since one was carrying twins. "They connected," nurse Joyce Wilson says, recalling the reaction of the women who saw the filmy image of their fetus onscreen. "They bonded. You could just see it. One girl got off the table and said, 'That's my baby.'"
"Another got up," Deborah Wood says, "and said, 'This changes everything.'"
Wood is the CEO of Asheville Pregnancy Support Services in Asheville, North Carolina, one of the thousands of crisis pregnancy centers in the U.S. that are working to end abortion. Hers is the new face of an old movement: kind, calm, nonjudgmental, a special-forces soldier in the abortion wars who is fighting her battles one conscience at a time. Her center helps women navigate the social-service bureaucracy, sign up for Medicaid and begin prenatal care. She helps pregnant girls find emergency housing if their parents threaten to throw them out. Free pregnancy tests and ultrasounds are just the latest service.
The Grassroots Abortion War (Protestants only)
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