I mentioned that I've been reading In the Night Season by Richard Bausch. Last night, I came across a passage about a woman who has discovered the body of a murder victim. It reminded me of the change that unwittingly and unknowingly lies in store for many women through an abortion.

This woman has encountered the body of a man whose house she cleans once a week. His throat has been slit. He is an old, innocent and gentle black man. The scene is narrated by the police investigator who is about to interview her:

"Hello," she said. He heard a jittery energy in the voice. She was fixed, with her panic, looking from one to the other of the men and seeing only what she had stumbled onto less than an hour ago. For her, life would now be colored by this--her perceptions would continually give off the sense of the proximity of harm, and it would go on that way for months or years, and even if time dulled the edges of it, she would never really find the self she had been before. He felt a kinship with her, and he thought of all those who had suffered the world's unrecoverable shocks, including the ones who had walked into the scenes of violence and mayhem, as a group of initiated people, a growing army of the psychologically scarred.