An abortionist has just written her book “This Common Secret: My Journey as an Abortion Doctor.” In the book she speaks about why women choose abortions, including a pro-life woman who had protested outside of her clinic, who needed her services when she became pregnant.
Reading the review brought to mind many, many stories. When I was a teenager I organized my state’s Teens for Life program. As the president of the organization, I traveled and spoke in public about abortion constantly. My audience were teens in their youth programs at their churches. One of the aspects of my talks that I was initially utterly unprepared for were the numbers of people who would come up to me after my talks and tell me about their abortion stories; why they did it, how it affected them, how they struggled with it. When I say “people” I am talking about teens and adults. I realized that abortion is not some theory to be talked about it. The people sitting in the pews lived abortion in their lives. They either had had one, or they had a mom/sister/aunt/grandmother/friend who had. It became very clear how prevalent abortion was in our country. It was not uncommon for me to receive phone calls from people long after my talks. In a way, these people wanted to explain why they had done what they had done.
As a teen I babysat for a wonderful Catholic woman. She had converted to the Church as an adult and she was instrumental in my own conversion to the Faith. Years later she would confess to me that she had aborted her first child when she herself was a child of 16. She told me how difficult it was for her to talk about her abortion, especially to devout Catholics because she was judged so harshly for what she had done. She told me about one Catholic man who told her “only a terrible, horrible, trashy woman could kill her own child.”
A group of women in my weekly prayer group decided to host an information talk on abortion for Hispanic families. When I heard about it, I spoke with them and stressed the importance of having Project Rachael information available because from my experience there is ALWAYS a post-abortive person in the room, man or woman.
A few years ago, before I married, I worked one summer in a popular bar/restaurant in town. One night after work a coworker & I were drinking a beer and chatting, when all of a sudden he blurted out that his child would have been 6 years that day. I was stunned. I asked him what happened to his baby. He told me his wife at the time had aborted their baby 6 years before. He told me how he wondered if the baby was a boy or a girl, what would the baby have been like. I had never heard the man’s perspective ever before, but his perspective sounded an awful like the post-abortive women who shared their stories with me. When I began to tell him that his grief was normal and shared by others who had lost their babies, he completely shut down and ended the conversation.
What is the point of these stories? According to the article 40% of all women abort their babies. 40%. That does not mention the fathers of those babies, the grandparents, the aunts and uncles, and friends impacted by the death and disappearance of millions of tiny people.
How do we decrease the numbers? Morning’s Minion, Jonathan, and Katerina all bring up key issues to what we can do. Morning’s Minion wants more societal support for poorer women to have their children, such as affordable day care, better welfare support, better pro-family policies in the workplace. Jonathan wants people to stop having premarital sex. And Katerina wants hearts to change. I say “Amen!” to all of the above. The Church can also talk about this issue not as if it is something Out There, but something that is happening right now by fellow Christians. I can count on one hand the numbers of anti-abortion/pro-woman/pro-child homilies I have ever heard from the pulpit. What a shameful disgrace! Millions of people are disappearing in our midst and the Sunday Pulpit is silent. Lastly, we Catholics have to own abortion. Catholics abort at the same rate as the atheist or secular woman. We have to begin with our families, our examples. Fathers have to be present for their daughters so that they don’t seek them out in every man they encounter. Parents cannot commit adultery on each other.
To finish, in college a classmate of mine was raped when she was home on break. She got pregnant from that rape. When she found out she was pregnant, the pro-life woman sat in her car and contemplated killing her child to “make it go away.” But she knew she could not live with herself if she did. So, instead, she went home and told her parents. Her father promptly kicked her out of the house and stopped funding her college studies. This is a devout Catholic family mind you. In my experience, the children of such families tend to abort their children because of the shame factor, so maybe this is what motivated her father. Here is she: Raped, Pregnant, Homeless. She called a local CPC and they gave her shelter and support. She spoke with our University and our University took care of her. And in her 8th month of pregnancy, still unsure what she was going to do–keep her baby or give it up for adoption–she was speaking at a Church about her experience, and a little girl came up to her afterwards and told her that the little girl’s mommy had given her up for adoption and she was so thankful for it. At that moment, my classmate knew that she would give her child up to a loving home. In the hospital room, her father and mother were present as their grandchild was handed over to his adoptive parents. The story ends well: father and daughter reconcile, child ends up in a good home, classmate able to deal with her rape. But that story could have ended so differently. We HAVE to have mercy on those who have aborted and give them hope. But we also HAVE to give support to pregnant unwed moms.
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