Motherhood and abortion
Some headlines, over and beyond Mother’s Day weekend.
New York Post editor William McGurn captured a lot here.
Mother’s Day is a good day in our house, partly because of the general bonhomie that links us with the many moms in our lives. There’s my wife, the mother of my children. There’s also her mother and my mother, both still with us and adored by their grandchildren.
And in the special recesses of our hearts, there are three more. These are the women who brought our daughters into the world — three women in China whom we have never met and whose names we don’t even know but to whom we owe our family.
Think of that, and let it sink in that three women in China gave life to three baby girls and then, because of their circumstances, gave those baby girls over for another family to raise and provide a good life, for each one of them.
This past summer my eldest traveled to China on her own to volunteer at an orphanage, where she learned a lesson that became her college essay. She had always wondered how a woman could give up her baby, she wrote. Then, at the orphanage, she became attached to one little fellow after just a few weeks, and gained a new appreciation for how difficult a decision it must have been — and the great selflessness that goes with it. And how lucky she was to have such a woman carry her to term, especially in a nation where she could easily have been aborted.
Another full stop. Contemplate just that thought.
Now, when moms and dads have families the traditional way, biology is a powerful partner: The child is of both of you, meant for you, a part of you and yet apart from you in a wondrous way. For an adoptive mom, love must fill in what biology has left open…
Our daughters come from very different places. The eldest comes from Yangzhou, where Marco Polo claimed to have served as governor under Kublai Khan in a city not unlike San Francisco.
The middle one comes from Nanchang, birthplace of the People’s Liberation Army, closer to a West Virginia.
The youngest comes from Chairman Mao’s home province, Hunan, where girls are known as “chili peppers” after the dominant ingredient in the spicy local cuisine.
Out of this patchwork of Chinese geography, with no DNA or blood to bind us, their mother formed a family. And when these girls sit on the edge of our bed Sunday morning and watch their mom enjoy the cup of coffee they’ve made for her, on their faces you would see the certainty this good woman gave them: I am loved.
What a testimony.
And then there was another one, quite the opposite, quite jarring. The recorded account of a young woman, plastered all over social media, who had her abortion experience videotaped (strategically) in a sort of defiant effort to show how that ‘choice’ can be a happy one. As if it’s really just a woman removing something from her body that got in the way of her plans and pursuits, an inconvenience she could easily remove. Some people were understandably repulsed by this show.
But my friend Elizabeth Scalia saw something more. She looked deeper, or longer, or thought harder about what the video really revealed. And she urges her readers ‘don’t become distracted by what this young woman is saying with her mouth, or you’ll miss all she’s revealing in her face.’
A month after the abortion — with the dramatic change in hairstyle that so many women effect when emotions are high and they need to feel in control of something — watch Emily, then. The light is gone from her eyes. The seeming disconnect between pc-fed head and instinctive heart is laid out in breathtaking and stark incongruity, even down to the shadows, the blue note, the lack of energy. Devastating. Cognizant of it or not, she is a mother in grief…
Frankly, if I were a young woman watching this and pondering abortion, one glance at those haunted eyes, that beautiful, woebegone countenance and benumbed, vacant tone, and I would be running to my nearest Birthright, or to the Good Counsel network, or to the Sisters of Life, whose founder, the mighty John Cardinal O’ Connor of the Archdiocese of New York, once pledged to help any needy pregnant woman seeking assistance instead of abortion, and whose successor, Cardinal Timothy Dolan, has maintained that position.
My heart breaks for this young woman and her baby who are so clearly victims of a pervasive rhetoric full of untruths and the banality of real evil. She needs our prayers and our whole-hearted spiritual assistance. Evidenced before us is a mind seduced and under the power of nefarious propaganda that has told her to serve her own desires unto death — one that has encouraged her to soul-shredding idolatry while its promulgators serve only death and political campaign coffers. It is a mind owned by insipid platitudes, now at war with a heart that says, “bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh, my baby, my heart, myself.”
What this young woman now knows — what resonates so clearly in her assertion that if her house were afire, she would grab the sonogram of her extinguished baby, and run — is that when she consented to kill her baby, she killed a very real piece of herself.
Even after a woman delivers a baby, or miscarries, or aborts, there remains within her, for the rest of her life, microscopic bits of her child — of each child she has ever conceived. Look up microchimerism and you will understand there is no such thing as “getting rid” of one’s baby, only of stopping it’s life and disposing of it, while carrying it within one’s very blood and sinew, forever.
Go to Elizabeth’s post for all the links in that text to places of help and healing, protection and caring, a few of which I provided here because they’re so critical for women in crisis.
She continues her appeal to understand what really goes on in an abortion, referring to ‘Emily’s good abortion’ video.
A body is made of living tissue and living tissue has memory. Pretty it up on video however you like, the insertion of a vacuum into a woman’s body and the perpetration a violent, limb-shredding execution within the deep recesses of her womb cannot help but reverberate like dark energy, throughout the woman’s body, mind and soul. You want to grab a sonogram of the baby you killed because the living part of that baby, still residing within you, is calling out for more of you, all of you.
And then there’s the consideration of women after the abortion. No longer the ‘women and babies’ outreach efforts because the babies are gone. But the women need help and relief. And look who’s there to help them. Women who were there, working in an abortion clinic or being ‘clients’ or ‘patients’ of one.
There has been an explosion recently of women sharing their personal abortion experiences as part of a new self-described “pro-VOICE” movement. The stated goal of this campaign is to shift the focus from debating the legality of abortion or discussing whether abortion is right or wrong, to sharing stories from individuals who offer an intimate look at life after abortion. One example is an article that was recently put out by Upworthy. In an attempt to paint abortion as a positive experience, the woman in the article said that she was “surprised” by several things that have happened after her abortion. There are many women who now suffer because of their abortion and we felt like our voices needed to be heard as well.
Here are those five voices.
Read them. Hear their voices. They want to be heard. They are mothers, after all. And they have something to say about the truth and consequences of that human relationship.
