"Have you read your sign?"

"Have you read your sign?"

It was an extraordinary sort of question, which perhaps excuses our slowness to respond. Finally someone replied: "I beg your pardon?"

The woman repeated her question and, when we assured her that we had certainly read our own sign (which begs readers not to believe the lies, and declares forthrightly that abortion kills babies), she continued: "Of course abortion kills babies. That's why people have abortions. Everyone knows that. Do you think people are stupid?"

The conversation did not become less bizarre as the minutes passed. When asked whether she was comfortable with the brutal dismemberment of babies, the woman discarded the term which she herself had used. They were no longer "babies" -- they were "fetuses". A few minutes later, they were "babies" again, and in a flash they were reduced to "parasites". She denounced unwanted infants in the womb as "inconvenient", then proudly noted that she had four children. She objected to our protesting of Planned Parenthood because of "all the good things they do" (which, from what she said, consists of providing contraceptives and having vaguely positive notions as to women). She almost angrily dismissed points made by Chris Gilbert saying: "You don't have uterus, so you can't have an opinion." She laughed when we likened accepting abortion to tacit acceptance of slavery, awkwardly waved off any references to the racist agenda inherent in abortion and particularly in the history of Planned Parenthood, and generally changed the subject every time she became uncomfortable (which was approximately every twenty seconds). She demanded to know if we had seen an abortion and when we all said that we had insisted that videos were not accurate; we could only understand abortion if we had had one or if we had stood beside someone as her baby was dismembered. Finally she shrugged us off, made a vague reference to war and to Iraq, and walked to her car, only to be confronted by two remarkably unfriendly Planned Parenthood employees who pointed out that she was trespassing on private property and must remove her car and herself immediately.

The entire conversation lasted five or ten minutes. It left us a bit stunned -- if not incredulous -- and rather thoughtful. There is so much ignorance, so much confusion, and so much pain. There are many who would not even have had the conflicted courage (or the longing) to stop and speak with us.

God bless her, whoever she is.

Have you read our sign today? Abortion kills babies.

Yes. It does.