Pro-life Equals Pro-women
But, the Catholic Church was there for her. The Church told her that she was forgiven, not forgotten. She had been given another chance. And so a light began to shine at the end of the tunnel. There was hope for her future.
In 1975, the National Conference of Catholic Bishops promulgated the Pastoral Plan for Pro-Life Activities, outlining three major programs of action for the pro-life movement in America: education, legislation, and reconciliation. It was to the last of these three that Vicki Thorn wanted to turn her attention. In 1984 she founded the National Office of Post-Abortion Reconciliation and Healing (NOPARH).
With her efforts, the Catholic Church became the first religious body to reach out to post-abortion women in a spirit of forgiveness and mercy. For the past twenty years, Vicki Thorn has been helping post-abortion women to come to terms with the fact of their abortions. In so doing, she has learned a critical truth about the culture of life. That is, that women who have had an abortion are the most eloquent defenders of life, since they are the ones who have been hurt by abortion the most.
NOPARH, located in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, is the national clearinghouse for Project Rachel, which is named after the Old Testament figure from the book of Jeremiah. “In Ramah is heard the sound of weeping. Rachel mourns her children. She refuses to be consoled because her children are no more. Thus says the Lord: Cease your cries of mourning. Wipe the tears from your eyes. The sorrow you have shown shall have its rewards” (Jeremiah 31:15-17).
The work of Project Rachel is grounded in an important principle: to be pro-life is to be vigorously and radically pro-woman. To put it another way, abortion is not only anti-child. It is also anti-woman. The most fundamentally feminist option, then, is to choose life.
So who is the “Rachel woman” to whom Vicki Thorn and others like her minister?
Vulnerable and Utterly Alone
She could be anyone, because to many women who have had an abortion, the procedure was the only option available to them. It wasn’t their first choice, but they believed that it was their last resort. They felt pressured into making a decision which didn’t solve their problems. As a matter of fact, seventy percent of “aborted women” report that they had some moral objection to the procedure even before it was performed on them.
Afterward, they’d say that it had burned a hole in their soul. It had made them the mother of a baby who had died an unnatural death. For those women, the abortion experience wasn’t a self-affirming one because it left them feeling vulnerable and utterly alone. There was a void inside of them that could not be filled. They realized only too late that they had bound themselves to someone else’s will. The only choice that remained for them was to cry out to heaven in the name of sorrow and hope.
I came to know Vicki Thorn and her ministry as a college intern back in 2000. Now, I work for her as a staff writer. Through my friendship with her, I have been afforded the opportunity to learn the cold and hard facts about abortion, and thus to get to know the “Rachel woman.” In their own words, post-abortion women have told us about the immense pain and suffering that has become a regular part of their lives. And as they have spoken, I have tried to listen and to piece together the horror of abortion for myself. One woman said that she didn’t want to have the abortion, “I did not want to go, but I was too tired to fight, too tired to think. I just stopped feeling inside. It wasn't really me that went that day, it was someone else.” She doesn't know “where my real self is anymore. I think that I died that day.”
Sometimes, the women tell us about the dreams that they have at night. Not a few of them have had nightmares about a baby boy. They hear him crying at night, but they are unable to find him, and so the search becomes frantic. Inside, they weep for him because they know that they will never find him. They “try to close their eyes at night and to see [themselves] back in that clinic…on that table. [They] just feel like dying inside.”
Another woman said that she was “having immense difficulty reconciling the life around me with the death and the irretrievable loss that I felt inside. When I was on that table,” she said, “I experienced death in all its blackness and finality.” Still one more woman confessed that “no one told me that the moment I terminated my pregnancy my spirit would begin to hemorrhage.” “Abortion,” she later reflected, “shatters a woman to her very core.” And, yet, their words continue to fall on deaf ears.
Enter the 2004 Democratic Presidential candidates and, at the helm, John Kerry. Let’s remember that this is the party that claims special sensitivity to “women’s issues.” But in the case of women who have had abortions, they have evidenced highly selective hearing.
Before John Kerry sped to the frontline of the Democratic race, Howard Dean occupied the main interests of the news media. In the week that preceded the Iowa Caucuses, People Weekly Magazine interviewed Howard Dean and his wife Judith Steinberg. At one point in the interview, he revealed his own ignorance about the deep psychological problems that are caused by an abortion. His stance on abortion seemed to be commonplace among Democrats. But, as an individual candidate, there was something different about his position.
Before he entered politics, he worked in the medical profession as an internist. During that time, though, he never had to deal with the human side of the abortion debate; he just had to contend with the science involved in it. As a matter of fact, he never administered an abortion nor trained to do so. Yet, he actually occupied a seat on the executive board of the New England chapter of Planned Parenthood, the largest abortion provider in the country. There, he encountered abortion as an impersonal social phenomenon, not as a life-changing decision that a lot of women face every day. He never had to make himself present to their deep and abiding pain. All he had to do was answer to the directors of Margaret Sanger’s national organization and officially represent them in the northeast. That kind of indifference, however, hardened his heart to the realities of life after an abortion. It made him incapable of tightening the gap between his patients and his politics. He thought that he could win the presidency without the vote of post-abortion women. After all, they were a small blip on his political radar screen.
Instead, Dean marketed his abortion politics to middle-Americans who morally object to the procedure even while they wouldn’t make it illegal under all circumstances. These people generally feel that this avenue needs to be open for women. In their minds, they are the ones who are standing on the side of women’s “authentic” liberation.
Of course, Dean has lost and dropped out of the race altogether. But, his abortion politics have not quitted the race. Rather, they have been passed on with even fuller force to the Democratic frontrunner, John Kerry.
As a matter of fact, if one compares John Kerry to Ted Kennedy (both Senators are from the state of Massachusetts) on social issues like abortion and homosexuality, Kerry makes Kennedy look like a Reaganite conservative. If Kerry wins the White House this year, abortion politics could be heading down a very wrong road, indeed.
I am convinced, though, that Kerry’s abortion politics can be a losing point for him because pro-life Republicans have a more compelling story to tell. Unfortunately, they haven’t been doing the best job of communicating it. Considering what is at stake, then, pro-life Republicans must re-take the abortion debate with renewed determination.
Refashioning the Rhetoric
And, here’s how. First of all, they need to refashion their reproductive rights rhetoric in such a way that it will earn both the hearing of middle-Americans as well as the growing number of post-abortion women. When the abortion issue comes up during the race to the White House, and we can be sure that it will at some point, they should be sure to play the empathy card to full effect. Middle-Americans think that their position on abortion favors the woman, but that’s precisely where they lose their ground. Conversely, the pro-life movement in America has to work out its own set of problems. For too long, it has fixated on the fetus at the expense of neglecting the mother. Both of these problems can be resolved to the benefit of the pro-life agenda. Most middle-Americans instinctively understand that womanhood is fittingly linked to motherhood. The pro-life movement should make that link central to its philosophy.
Those of us with families know that the only way to care for a child is to nurture its mother. It becomes the vocation of fathers, brothers, and husbands, then, to support and to encourage that natural bond. In this view of things, the interest of the woman is never far from that of her child. The two are inseparably linked. And when they are disjoined by abortion, something unnatural happens inside of the woman. In the end, abortion is never a good thing for the mother or her child.
I would encourage President Bush and other pro-life candidates to make an epistemological readjustment. They need to start to focus on the woman and her needs. Abortion is immoral, not only because it destroys the life of child, but also because it destroys the life of a woman. (The language used by Project Rachel underscores this by referring to post-abortion women as “aborted women”.) When the pro-life message is reassessed along these lines, it sheds light on the fundamental truth that an anti-abortion philosophy is also a pro-woman one. By widening their stance, pro-lifers could regain important ground in the abortion debate. Middle-Americans already give preferential treatment to the woman, since she is present in a way that the fetus is not. So, for as long as the pro-life community neglects the needs of the woman, the child will lose every time. The gestalt that I am proposing here wouldn’t compromise the pro-life platform. It would just make it more compelling.
Yet, in order to reclaim that territory most effectively, pro-lifers will need to clearly confirm their unconditional love for post-abortion women. This epistemological development would accomplish that task by firmly establishing a relationship of radical solidarity between pro-lifers and post-abortion women. As Pope John Paul II said, it would require the pro-life movement to become “courageously ‘pro-woman,’ promoting a choice that is truly in favor of them.” This is important since “it is precisely the woman, in fact, who pays the highest price, not only for her motherhood, but even more for its destruction, for the suppression of the life of the child who has been conceived.”
But, if women are going to absorb that message, then they’ll need to know that they are loved. It won’t be sufficient to simply state the fact. As Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. once said, “whosoever you would change, you must first love, and they must know that you love them.” By drawing out the full implications of an abortion, the pro-life community would communicate its love for the woman ever more convincingly. But, in order to do that, it would need to better document and disseminate the grave psychological harm that the procedure causes a woman. After all, the answer to a crisis pregnancy is to eliminate the crisis, not the child. Pro-lifers could realize that goal by providing the woman with the authentic help and sympathy that she needs and deserves.
In the end, it’s one thing to take a stand against abortion because it destroys the life of the unborn. But it is quite another to oppose it on the grounds that it devastates both the mother and her child. Middle-Americans will listen to this message and respond to it warmly. And, as they do, Republican political candidates like President George W. Bush will be able to reclaim a key role in the debate. For they will be steering it in a bold new direction according to the principle that there is hope after an abortion.
© Copyright 2004 Catholic Exchange
John Paul Shimek frequently writes about the JP2-Generation and issues related to men's spirituality. His writing has appeared in the National Catholic Register, the Newark Catholic Advocate, and the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. He lives in Brookfield, Wisconsin. Readers can contact him at intermirifica@hotmail.com .