Seven years after her abortion, Pat Layton was driving down an interstate highway in Florida when she burst into tears. The Christian talk show playing on her car radio featured women talking about their abortions. They mentioned their struggles with drugs, alcohol, anger, depression, and shame. Layton had experienced all of those problems and she was finally realizing that they stemmed from her abortion as a college student in 1977.

Austin and Bryan, Texas. Chattanooga, Tenn. Elkton, Md. Grand Rapids, Mich. Toledo, Ohio. Wichita, Kan. These are seven of the at least 20 cities where pro-life groups have taken over and repurposed former surgical abortion facilities. They are now crisis pregnancy centers, pro-life offices, or memorials. 

In C.S. Lewis’ The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, young King Caspian visits an island under his rule and discovers the territory embroiled in the slave trade. The Narnian king demands the lazy governor explain why the islanders have resorted to this “abominable and unnatural traffic in slaves.” The governor’s reply? “Necessary, unavoidable. … An essential part of the economic development of the islands, I assure you.”

Dan and Carol Learned were at church half an hour away when a tornado hit their Washington, Ill., neighborhood. As the congregation returned from the church basement, cell phones began to vibrate and buzz with updates from Washington. A neighborhood friend texted one of the Learned kids: “The whole street’s gone.”

A young woman in a flowy pink shirt sits next to her mom in the waiting room of an OB-GYN office in Midland. She’s quiet and seems a little nervous. Unmarried and 21 years old, she’s 32 weeks pregnant.

It’s a warm morning in early autumn at the Michigan-Ontario border. U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) Officers Ken Hammond and Greg Calhoun stand in a closed lane at the Port Huron primary inspection booths in their dark blue uniforms. It’s overcast, but both men wear sunglasses. Behind them, cars, RVs, and semitrucks split into their assigned lanes as they approach the booths from the Blue Water Bridge. The bridge, which connects the United States and Canada over the St.

Jon Peters, who in 1989 set the record for the most consecutive wins of any high-school baseball pitcher—51—gave pesky reporters a lot of God talk: “Anytime I felt that the media were getting too close … all I had to do was mention God, and you could see them step back.” Peters regularly thanked God during interviews, because he didn’t want the world to know that he was full of fears and had even attempted suicide.