He Leadeth Me: An Extraordinary Testament of Faith

by Walter J. Ciszek

Abortion is legal in the Soviet Union. Anyone who wants one can have it performed. The government says it had to be legalized in order to prevent private abuses. The wages of husband and wife together make it hard to support more than one or two children, so everyone wants an abortion. Yet the question haunts them. The hallways of the clinics adjoining the abortion rooms were full of posters, not praising abortion but informing patients of the possible detrimental effects on both mind and body such an operation could have. The doctors, mostly women, and the nurses and other personnel would try to dissuade patients from the operation. Women confided years later that they could not rid themselves of feelings of guilt about it. And these were not “believers” but women and girls who had received a complete atheistic education in Soviet schools. Even for Communism, it is a basic question of life and death, of wrong and right. If life at its very root can be treated so lightly, people would say, who is going to stop such a mentality from spreading? Society? Hardly. Society cannot even handle properly its present problems of crime and other social disorders. And when a society actually endorses evil, where will it end? Can man alone be trusted to solve mankind’s problems? Look at history, and the depths to which civilized countries have sunk, time after time.