It was the seventies. Susan and I walked past it every Sunday on our way to and from church. It was a lovely little house, single-story, low adobe wall lined with flowers around the yard, a walk to the door. One Sunday, Susan told me: “They do abortions there.”

We were students, getting to know each other through these weekly walks down the Santa Fe hills to the plaza in the center of town and then back. Abortion was legal then, but only newly so. The contrast between the grisly business inside and the lovely view from the street—well, it hit deep. That beyond this beautiful yard, inside this elegant little house, tiny humans were being routinely killed: I could hardly take it in.

*   *   *

When Susan had her first article, “The Aborting Community,” published in the Human Life Review [link? Fall 1982, or reprint Winter 2012], there was great pride amongst those who had known her when she was growing up. The thin, bookish girl was now a published author! I remember her mother passing around a copy of the issue at a party. Not everyone was pleased. One of the guests, with barely suppressed anger, told Susan that abortion was necessary, that it was a good thing. Although she was an old family friend, and indeed a decent person with a heart for people in hard places, she stood on the other side of this wall.

In the decades to come we would know people on both sides of this wall. Once, we were guests in the home of the head of the local Planned Parenthood affiliate, having been invited with our children to dinner. I remember an elegant meal; I remember graciousness bestowed upon us beyond our deserts. Our hostess knew my views on the matter, and Susan’s; she knew of our great difference. Yet nothing was said of that. There was nothing in her reception of us—or her home—that was any less hospitable than that of a hundred others who, at one time or other, had us to dinner.

*   *   *

The elegance of that Santa Fe house, inside of which abortions were carried out, contrasts sharply with how abortion facilities more commonly appear. The film Juno has a memorable depiction of a shabby clinic with a distracted, indifferent clerk. Shabbiness, I think, is the more accurate everyday picture. On the far extreme, the horrific details of the office of the now-imprisoned abortionist Kermit Gosnell of Philadelphia: They make for difficult reading.

Sometimes the outside does reflect the inside. Sometimes not. But in the long run, all hidden secrets will be exposed. Meanwhile, it is salutary to ponder that elegance and beauty can accompany moral failure. This is a truth that is pro-life in the broadest sense, and in the face of which every one of us falls short. Whatever is commendable about me or thee can exist side-by-side with awful failures. I too can boast a pleasant facade behind which lies much that needs repentance and change. Indeed, I do so almost every day.

Christians around the world are beginning the season of repentance, as, at other times and in their own way, most other religions do. In such a season, as we thank God for showing us the intrinsic dignity of every human being, we need also to ask him to further his purification of our own hearts.

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—The Rev. Canon Victor Lee Austin, theologian-in-residence for the Episcopal Diocese of Dallas, is the author of a handful of books, including Losing Susan: Brain Disease, the Priest’s Wife, and the God Who Gives and Takes Away.