Crosses Represent Lives Lost to Abortion
Posted by Liz Cutler Gates on September 25, 2009
Bill Landrigan sees the white crosses on the hill near Grace College’s Morgan Library in Winona Lake, Ind., as facilitating one-way conversation.
“Both men and women have stopped and cried,” he says. “It hits a lot of people deep in their soul.”
Each one of the 504 crosses represents four abortions from 1982 to 2008 – each by a resident of Kosciusko County, Ind., where the college is located – for a total of 2,106 abortions. The figures are based on Indiana Department of Health statistics, according to Landrigan, who serves on the board of the Kosciusko County Right to Life. He estimates there have been many more since abortion was legalized in 1973. He is quick to note that there are no abortion facilities in the county, so residents need to travel elsewhere in the state to have the procedure.
For Landrigan, a 73-year-old former school principal, the hillside of crosses is also a hillside of prayers.
“When making these, I touched the boards at least five times,” he recalls. “I asked the Lord to make every time I touch a board a prayer – for the abortions, for the children in the wombs, for the mothers and fathers. Now I’ve touched them many times and, of course, others have, too.”
He looks around the grassy slope where Larry Long, 69, and Warren Zellner, 75, are helping him place the crosses in a pattern reminiscent of the military cemeteries at Arlington, Va., or Normandy, France.
Long, a former vice president for sales at a local orthopaedic company who now serves on the board of the Heartline Pregnancy Center, thinks about the more than 2,000 people it represents. “Some of them would be young adults attending college now,” he says, his eyes sweeping across the campus. “Each time I put one in (the ground), I think of the little babies it represents.”
Landrigan was moved to create the memorial after he saw a similar permanent installation outside a country church. He constructed each cross from 1×3-inch furring strips at a cost of less than a dollar a piece – all paid from his own pocket. They are set eight feet apart. When placed on a flat field, as they were last summer on the playground at Sacred Heart School in nearby Warsaw, they cover an area that is 240 feet by 160 feet.
This is the third site for the crosses since last summer’s display in Warsaw. It has also been installed at a business north of Warsaw, and at First Christian Church on Fox Farm Road. The installation at the college coincides with the annual Right to Life banquet, which will be held at the school’s Orthopaedic Capital Center on September 28.
“We need to make people aware of the abortion situation,” says Zellner, a retired contractor whose wife, Nancy, also serves on the local Right to Life board. “When you consider the number of babies that have been lost, I wish all our churches would stand up and make a fuss,” he adds.
Top photo: Crosses on the lawn surrounding Grace College’s Morgan Library represent more than 2,000 abortions from Kosciusko County, Ind., over a 26-year period.
Center photo: Bill Landrigan and Larry Long pound another cross in the ground.
Bottom photo: Warren Zellner prepares to begin another row of crosses.
Filed Under: Uncategorized
I am a prolife obgyn md and my first child is now a freshman at Grace and I am very proud for her to attend a college who would make such a display on their campus.