Catholics with ASD Children and the Pro-Life Movement [UPDATED]

I had the unusual experience a few months ago of having a former mentor contact me to ask me to write a letter of recommendation for graduate school. M. was a remarkable soprano a few years my senior; as a young singer, I assiduously tried to pattern myself after her. But because of a combination of forces -- one of the most intractable of which was a difficult family situation -- her career was not what it might have been. She eventually became the mother of a large family, got an advanced degree, and began working in another field. The graduate program she was applying to, however, was in music, and, though I hadn't heard her in years and wondered what the appeal of a performance degree could possibly be at this stage in her life, I was happy to write on her behalf, and delivered a sincere assessment of her numerous fine qualities as an artist, colleague, and friend.

We had been out of touch for a few years and, while working on the letter, I gradually learned that since we'd last spoken, two of her children had been institutionalized for Heller's Syndrome -- also known as Child Disintegrative Disorder or CDD -- one at the age of six. Once considered a distinct diagnosis, CDD is now, like Asperger's at the other end of the dial, rolled under the rubric of Autism Spectrum Disorder in the DSM-5, the standard diagnostic manual for psychiatric disorders. If CDD is indeed a cognitive disorder that falls on the autism spectrum, it seems like a particularly brutal and horrible manifestation one: the child develops perfectly normally until the age of three or four, and then loses not only speech, but every other acquired skill as well. At this age, children have some awareness of what is going on, and the affected ones are reported to have episodes of extreme terror -- perhaps because they are losing the ability to speak, to do, to comprehend -- before they shut down completely.

I don't know how one survives such a thing as a parent.

But it's not as if one can stop getting up in the morning.

I started thinking about what it's like, as a practicing Catholic (which M. is as well), to have a child with autism. My own son with autism is only mildly affected, especially relative to M.'s two CDD children, and living with him, in spite of some painful difficulties presented by his behavior, also brings its own kind of fulfillment and rewards. But I haven't experienced any support -- neither understanding smiles or kind words, nor extensions of friendship -- from my faith community. I've found it extremely hard to make friends with mothers of typical children, including those I meet at church, because my ASD son is so obviously different, and his behavior can be so disruptive, that people with the usual sort of children either withdraw, or simply don't extend themselves. (I've also received this response from progressive types, interestingly; it generally comes about after my son has gone along passing for normal for a time, and then suddenly does something egregious.)

While I've never seen mothers of children with autism embraced in pro-life Catholic (or any other) circles, mothers of children with Down Syndrome are very much celebrated in our community. Perhaps this lionization of DS mothers is based on the fact that, since prenatal testing can reveal the condition, and the law permits a choice of responses to it, in many cases the parents of DS children have consciously chosen life for these children, something that many in the wider culture do not do. So, if there were some kind of prenatal test that revealed autism in utero, and if mothers in these circumstances also "chose life" (which I would wager far fewer in the larger culture would do for autistic unborn children than they do even for DS), would these mothers find more support from Catholic mothers of typical children? I don't think so.

Children with Down Syndrome are generalized to be happy and loving, and even to have unique propensities for holiness; they are sentimentalized as "special" gifts from God for "special" parents. Children with autism are not. Children with Down Syndrome are welcomed, even celebrated, by people of faith; who can forget the near-hagiography surrounding Trig, the DS infant son of Sarah Palin, during the presidential campaign of 2008? Children with autism are not; in fact, when they are murdered by their parents, a chorus of voices generally arises to exonerate their killers. Children with Down Syndrome are viewed as sweet-natured, possessed of a unique sort of hidden wisdom, Holy Fools. Children with autism are . . . not. Even a beloved friend of mine, a faithful Catholic whom I respect and admire, told me that she would be happy to babysit for Jude, but not for my older son. (In her defense, she apologized immediately afterward, but I brooded about it for weeks.)

Even the panic over vaccines, and the increasing rates of vaccine refusal on the misguided ground that they cause autism -- and the vaccine-deniers cut through a cross-section of conservative and liberal -- underlines the point: no one wants a child with autism. Even in what we like to think of as the Catholic subculture -- the counterculture! -- the undergirding of our dominant American materialist-Calvinist culture bleeds through, and I suspect that parents of autistic children, and the children themselves, are seen to a certain degree as cursed by God, with an undercurrent of "who sinned, this man or his parents, that he should be born blind?"

If anyone looks at me, they have plenty of reason to confirm such a belief. I'm an egregious sinner. And my husband was in his forties when our autistic son was conceived, and there's a strong correlation between autism and paternal age. So people in our midst may breathe a sigh of relief if they have avoided our mistakes, or may congratulate themselves for their superior wisdom and virtue. They may even refuse vaccines. Perhaps they will thus be able to avoid both the very real difficulties and the very real loneliness of having children with autism. Or perhaps not. Who knows? But the persistent, underlying narrative, both in the larger world and in the subculture of faithful Catholics, is that autistic lives are less valuable, and far less desired, even than other disabled lives, and that if you get too close, some of it might rub off on you.

The Talmud suggests a prayer to be recited upon seeing a person who is disabled; perhaps it can be applied to people with autism as well, although they often do not appear different:

One who sees… an albino, or a giant, or a dwarf, or a person with dropsy, says ‘Blessed is He who made his creations different from one another.’ One who sees a person with missing limbs, or a blind person, or one with a flattened head, or a lame person, or one who suffers from boils or a person with a whitening skin complaint says, ‘Blessed is the true Judge.’ (Talmud Bavli Berachot 58b)

I do not expect to be celebrated by my co-religionists or anyone else for having an autistic child, but I would like not to be shunned. And I think that a real challenge at the heart of the pro-life movement is to formulate a loving response to the lives of those with disabilities, including the disabilities that are not immediately apparent, are not cuddly and inviting, and may not make you feel like a Good Person for embracing. For God is present in even the most disastrous of lives.

How Not to Do It

No, they probably shouldn't have done that.

My cousin (who, incidentally, is pro-life) posted the video in the link to Facebook. I'd say it's a pretty textbook example of how not to protest abortion. Ironic that one of the protesters is carrying an image of the Divine Mercy.

I.e., Not the Same Thing as Voting Republican

Ed Mechmann works for the Family Life/Respect Life Office of the Archdiocese of New York, and is a member of my former parish. This is from the blog he writes for the Archdiocese:

Being “pro-life” — as opposed to merely taking “pro-life” positions — has a much broader and deeper meaning [than winning elections].  It involves a recognition of the sacredness of life, its inherent dignity, that views each individual human being as having inestimable value because he or she is made in the image and likeness of God.  It rejects a reductionist or utilitarian view of humanity, where lives are disposable if they are inconvenient, not “useful”, or if they came into being in a way that we disapprove.   It entails a commitment to defending each and every life against abuse, from whatever source.  It calls people to acts of direct service to the poor, the vulnerable, and the frail.  It is an attitude of reverence in the divine presence, seen in every human person [emphasis added].

Read the rest here.

Bags of Money

Simcha Fisher has one of the blog posts up that she comes out with sometimes -- the kind that bring you up short for a moment, then lead you to ponder the state of your soul, but in the friendliest way possible. It's about the new ministry founded by former Planned Parenthood clinic manager Abby Johnson, whose mission is to help former abortion-industry workers "through these four integral aspects: emotional, spiritual, legal and financial."

Not surprisingly, Johnson's plans have met with scorn and disgust -- from pro-lifers.

Simcha writes:

When Johnson announced her initiative on Facebook, some putative pro-lifers responded with anger and disgust at the thought of making it easy for abortionists to leave the industry. . .  several [comments suggested] that if the abortion workers really had a change of heart, they ought to quit on the spot and take a job at McDonald's to show the strength of their convictions. And a few even condemned these men and women outright, calling them murderers -- saying that, far from deserving help, they deserve to rot in hell.

Let's be very clear here. Yes, Jesus loves a leap of faith. Jesus loves martyrs. Jesus calls us to take up our cross, abandon our former lives and follow him.  But he also requires those of us who are already following him to make the journey easier for each other. We're supposed to take up our own crosses willingly, but try to make each other's crosses lighter.  

This is what St. Nicholas was doing when, according to legend, he crept through the streets at night, tossing bags of gold coins into the window of a poor famiy contemplating selling their daughters into prostitution. Or maybe you can imagine the original Santa Claus harumphing, "If they really thought prostitution was so wrong, they'd rather starve than get involved in that industry!" Nope. Bags of money. It's called "being the body of Christ" -- a body that has arms and hands that do the work.

If only pro-lifers considered how far some of them, including some of the most ardent and committed, drive those who have been involved in abortion, including the most thoroughly repentant, away. They make it seem as if self-justification, rather than demonstrating the love of Christ to (other) sinners, were the goal of their pro-life work. Remember, people, only God can read hearts.

Love and Evil

Truth and love must prevail over lies and hatred.
-- Vaclav Havel

A few years ago, this blog sparked the interest of several self-styled Catholic-internet heresy-hunters. In this it was hardly special or unique, but I wasn't prepared for their attacks. My blog didn't seem like the usual target for this type, since I generally don't address controversial issues, or at least not -- or so I'd like to believe -- from a polarizing position. Nonetheless, I got vitriolic hate mail in the comboxes. Women (at least they claimed to be women) who assured me that they themselves could never, ever have fallen into the serious sin that I had, nonetheless informed me that my blog was a destructive example to other post-abortive women, since it wasn't the cheeriest thing out there. Another apparently-female armchair theologian emailed my real-life close friend Dawn Eden to advise her to drop my blog from her own blogroll, because of her (the reader's) interpretation of an emoticon I'd used in a combox response. I was rattled by this, and no less so when a guy I had dated, a fairly prominent Catholic journalist, piled on in private, emailing me to let me know that I had "more in common with the Gadarene horde" than with the Magdalene (oh, I forgot to mention that one comboxer -- if I'm recalling correctly, I think it was the one who contacted Dawn Eden -- accused me of styling myself a "new Magdalene" based on my email address, which was a reference to a novel by that title which I used in my doctoral research . . . you see how Talmudic things were getting), criticizing me for my artistic "unsuccess," and attacking virtually every member of my family. (This fellow had once asked me to marry him, though he may have been drunk at the time. I was so very glad that I had at least had the foresight to say no.)

I have always had very detailed dreams, and those dreams, as dreams invariably are, have often been extremely fantastical. Except in very rare circumstances, I don't believe that dreams are prophetic, or that they're often even in any way a reflection of reality. Occasionally, though, an image from a dream will stay with me throughout the following day, and, when I turn it over and over in my mind, it will start to seem like a comment on something that exists in waking life. I had a dream like this last night. Without going into all the arcane and byzantine details, the main image in this dream showed something that I believe is true in reality: that evil is seductive, that it cloaks itself in the trappings of the beautiful and the good. Hardly a new idea there, but one that we all need to remember, particularly those among us who believe that we could never, ever be in commission of serious sin.

If you yourself have never, ever been in commission of such a sin -- oh, how fortunate you are! How grateful you must be to God for keeping you free from evil and participation in it -- because you must know that it is only His grace that has kept you free from these things, and not your own merits. And remember that, as He told Saint Faustina, the most egregious sinners have the most right to His mercy. And that He did not condemn the woman caught in adultery. And that tax collectors and prostitutes enter the kingdom of heaven before the self-styled righteous.  And that He had a huge party for the repentant one, and that there is more rejoicing in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine virtuous men. And so on.

I have no right to admonish anyone, clearly. But who does? Probably not the proudly orthodox Catholics who troll the internet looking for other believers to mock, blame, and criticize, nor the Catholic "apologists" who skate on the outer edges of preaching righteous hatred against those whom we are commanded to love -- including their co-religionists! -- or those virtuous ones who recoil at the sinner, even where he is repentant, and conveniently forget that, as Christians, we are required to aid in the reform and rehabilitation of even those sinners who are most personally repugnant to us.

I've been thinking about these things since getting a call from Sister M. of the Sisters of Life about a poor young mother in desperate need of help, and also since reading a coincident combox discussion at Vox Nova, in which several of the loudest voices appeared to assert that it's justified to criticize pro-lifers, because pro-lifers tend not to regard post-abortive women (men are never mentioned in these discussions) in quite as blameworthy a light as logic dictates (um, I can assure you that these "anti-pro-lifers" are, in many cases, wrong to assume a lack of blame). The prevailing criticism against the pro-life movement is that many of its adherents also (and illogically) support policies that are punitive to poor single mothers who choose life; in other words, that once the baby is born, tough luck. Sadly, there is some truth to this. A., the young mother for whom Sister M. is trying to enlist help, is one of the most forgotten and despised among us, a poor, young, uneducated single mother of color living in an urban shelter. There is no good excuse for any of us, pro-life or not, to allow women and children to be as ignored and forgotten as she is, and those of us who are pro-life have a responsibility, whatever our political beliefs, to help her and the hundreds of thousands of others like her.

On the other hand, the tortured casuistry with which the Vox Nova commenters strove to make their point is just an exercise in intellectual pride, an excuse for a lack of action, a lack of charity, and a lack of true love. One commenter used Guttmacher Institute statistics to demonstrate that women don't choose abortion out of desperation, but he defined desperation as economic adversity, rather than, more accurately, as the kind of abysmal loneliness, the profound sense of failure, rejection, and unloveableness, out of which so much evil is born into the world, and which is the real reason for most abortions, and also the reason for most unwanted pregnancy in the first place.

Let us remember, as Advent draws to a close, that our enemy is our intellectual better. He knows how to use our tendencies and proclivities to induce us to acts of pettiness, vanity, selfishness, and unkindness, which only serve to snowball into more and more serious sin. He knows how to make what is ugly appear to be beautiful, and how to make what is evil appear to be the highest good, and thereby to tempt even the righteous to it. The only remedy for evil, and for the misery of sin, is true love.

"I had a slightly different experience . . . "

There is a bill now before the New York City Council that would require crisis pregnancy centers to disclose in their advertising -- which is seen mostly on the subway, and in bus shelters -- the services which they do and do not provide, the latter being abortion.  The bill was triggered by a recent study undertaken by NARAL, which aims to show that the pregnancy centers use deceptive advertising to lure young women in crisis and . . . not give them abortions.  Chris Slattery, a member of my old parish in the Bronx and the director of Expectant Mother Care, which runs pregnancy centers in some of New York's poorest neighborhoods, believes that this proposed legislation is an attack on the work that the centers do, because, while technically it doesn't seem like a bad idea to require businesses to be specific about what they do and don't offer, in the case of the emergency pregnancy centers, this forced disclosure could very likely lead to loss of life.  If an abortion-minded woman in a crisis pregnancy goes to an EMC center without knowing that abortion is not on the menu, it's easier for the staff to persuade her to change her mind.  This, NARAL says, is a very bad thing indeed.  The fact that a woman may be talked out of having an abortion apparently does grievous harm to her freedom of choice.

I was fascinated today to read this article in the New York Times, in which a pregnant newspaper reporter took herself on an investigative-journalistic tour of two crisis pregnancy centers and one Planned Parenthood clinic.  She went first to one of Chris Slattery's centers, and was overwhelmed by what she freely calls the love with which she was welcomed.  She also admits that Planned Parenthood was the only one of the three places that had "a financial stake" in the choice she made vis-à-vis her (in real life, non-crisis) pregnancy. 

But most salient for me in this story were the reader comments -- or, I should say, one of the reader comments, which twisted my heart (most of the other comments were just what you might expect):

I am a pro-choice woman educated at one of the seven sisters and one of the Ivies. My point in stating this is that I am a liberal who strongly believes in the importance of privacy in this decision. I had a slightly different experience.

It was in the early nineties, I was fresh out of grad school, newly married and looking for a job in the recession of the early 1990s. I used to go to a clinic on the Upper West Side of Manhattan for routine gynecologic care because I did not have health insurance. I occasionally saw people milling around saying prayers on the weekends (I lived in the area) outside the building.

Fast forward to when I found myself pregnant at 13 weeks in a crumbling relationship. I went there to ask about my options. Not once was I told about carrying the pregnancy to term. I went for an ultrasound and other than measuring the thickness of the uterine wall, the technician did not show me the fetus and as dumb as I was I honestly did not even think to ask. I think they assumed I was there for an abortion.

They told me to come in late on a weekday evening to have "something put in" to prepare for the procedure the next day [This would have been a second-trimester abortion which requires a procedure that takes place over two days].  I was torn about doing it and when I asked the doctor questions before he put [in] the "seaweed extract," his exact words to me were, "we can sit here talking about it or we can just get it done. Do you want to do it or not? You need to make your mind up." So I went along.

It was only the next morning as I awoke with my warm cheek to the cold steel of the gurney after the procedure/abortion that I realized I was in an abortion mill. They rushed to get me off of the gurney even though I was groggy as anything to put others like me on the same gurneys while those of us who had gotten of the gurneys sat around on couches mostly with dazed looks in our eyes.

Fast forward 19 years, I have three wonderful children and a good life that I am thankful for yet I think of that fetus/baby every single day. For me this is not about politics, this is about the personal choice I made and that I have to live with every day of my life.

In my case I do think there is something to be said for the concept of post abortion depression. I am no psychologist, politician or religious person and I can only speak for myself. I really don't think this should be a political matter. For myself I wonder if I might have made the same choice if I had the information I now think I should have asked for and received [emphasis added].

Hindsight is 20/20 and I take full responsibility for what I did all those years ago but not a day goes by that I don't think of the fetus/baby. So in response to your article about the "crisis pregnancy centers," my experience was that it went the other way as well. 

So heartbreaking.  And even more so because the writer appears to feel almost apologetic, as if she must qualify her experience as something peculiar to her:  "I had a slightly different experience  . . . For me this is not about politics . . . I can only speak for myself . . . In my case . . . dumb as I was . . .  I do think there is something [to] post abortion depression.  I am no psychologist . . . I can only speak for myself," etc.  This is hardly the language of empowered womanhood, and not exactly what one would expect from a self-proclaimed pro-choice liberal with an Ivy League graduate degree.  The pain of her choice -- a choice that was clearly coerced every step of the way, as so very many abortions are -- is only underscored by the fact that, in her circles, there are few, if any, socially-sanctioned ways to speak about the suffering and regret of abortion without facing scorn.

I pray not only for this woman's healing, but also that other readers of the article will read her comment with care, and perhaps might begin to understand that her story is not some anomaly, experienced only by women "dumb as [she] was" (what a sadly ironic self-descriptor from such a highly-educated woman).  If the New York City Council demands truth in advertising, then this woman's testimony should be included in all of Planned Parenthood's pro-abortion literature. And what a great day it will be when pro-choice women -- many if not most of whom in my experience have never had abortions themselves -- come to realize that what is good for one is good for all, and what is destructive to one woman is destructive to each and every one of us.

Deceptions and Enormities

I just finished reading a short story by the poet (and prolific writer in many genres) Donald Hall, "From Willow Temple," which you can read in its entirety here.  The story, about a young farm girl whose inadvertent witnessing of her mother's adultery resets the trajectory of her own life, is restrained and affecting, notable as much for what Hall leaves unsaid as for his stance of quiet, distant compassion for his characters.  He has his protagonist muse:  "Surely I was changed forever . . . . I knew that by universal conspiracy we agreed to deny the wickedness of every human being.  We needed, every hour, to understand:  The fabric of routine covered unseen deceptions and enormities.  We also needed to remember that the cloth must show no rips or tears, and this covering was as real as anything." 

Then I read the Facebook status update of a man from my old parish who runs a crisis pregnancy center in the South Bronx, helping desperate young women seeking abortions to choose life instead, and supporting them in every way possible in that choice.  On his Facebook, he often posts anecdotes from the day-to-day work of the interns who tend to the young mothers.  One young woman, he wrote, came to the office seeking an abortion because of her dire economic situtation and her desire to finish school.  A friend of his -- incidentally, a self-described conservative Catholic homeschooling mother -- commented, "If you want to finish school, don't have sex!"

Then I picked up the copy of Marian Helper that had come in the mail, the little journal published by the Marians of the Immaculate Conception, the order in Stockbridge, Massachusetts whose apostolate is the spread of the Divine Mercy devotion.  I read an excerpt from a memoir written by Fr. Donald Calloway, a priest in the order, who had been a runaway, a drug addict, and a criminal before his conversion.  The story included a photograph of Fr. Calloway addresing a crowd, and quoted from his address:  "Don't think I'm holy, because I'm not.  The honeymoon is over.  I go through trying times, tough times, and I am tempted like you don't know.  Big time.  So pray for me . . . I need it.  I'm a hunted man.  Satan hates my guts.  And I am still a man in the conversion process [in need of] more mercy, more mercy, more mercy.  That's what I need, what we all need."

At first, I misread "hunted" as "haunted," and I began to wonder if all of us are divided into two groups, the haunted and the scared -- those who have committed "deceptions and enormities," and those whose fear of the consequences has prevented them from doing so.  Of course, this is wretchedly simplistic.  Still, reading the barely-disguised contempt of the homeschooling mother on Facebook for the poor young girls in my old borough reminded me once again that those who were lucky enough to receive sound moral instruction in their early lives should not attribute their good fortune to their own merits, and that from those to whom much has been given, much is expected.

Whether haunted or scared, however, we are all hunted; surely we can unite in our recognition of this, our human condition.  Some of us, like Fr. Calloway, are "tempted . . . big time"; others are probably tempted to far less spectacular sins, like the common house-and-garden pride and scorn that is so very hard to weed out of our hearts, and which seem to me emblematic of the state of being scared -- for surely it's fear that leads us, more sinful than the publican and less virtuous than the Pharisee, to commend ourselves for having avoided spectacular sin and for having achieved much.  This brittle self-commendation surely masks the quite justified fear that our nice lives, our accomplishments, our sense of ourselves as good people doing good things, could be swept away from one moment to the next by the simplest, most unwitting mistakes made in a moment of carelessness.  Which is why, in addition to being hunted men, we all need more mercy, more mercy, more mercy; and the more we're given, the more we are required to show to those poor souls we're inclined to scorn.

The Moral Theologian and Me

This blog almost never comments on current events.  There is no need for it.  Plenty of other blogs do, after all, and I usually find such commentary -- often no less than the current events themselves -- distasteful at best.  But I feel troubled enough by the case of Sister Margaret McBride, the Irish Sister of Mercy excommunicated for consenting to the performance of a so-called therapeutic abortion in the hospital where she was a long-time administrator, to address it here.

I have no idea what happened in that hospital, and I agree with Gerard Nadal that we don't know enough about the mother's condition to understand why Sr. Margaret thought the procedure was justified.  There is plenty of the expected hand-wringing about "liberal nuns" flying through the interwebs, and it's probably safe to assume that Sr. Margaret is one of them, but I do not think it's safe to assume that her tragic decision was guided by any political ideology.  The mother had four children at home, and someone appears to have been convinced that she would die if she continued her pregnancy.  I myself do not know if death would indeed have been the outcome; nobody does.  Nor do I know if her condition might have been stabilized to the point that her baby could have been delivered at the earliest possible point of viability and be kept in the NICU for several months.  My interest, instead, is in the misguided compassion that leads mothers, fathers, friends, grandparents, doctors, nuns, hospital administrators, and all the rest to believe, even if only for a moment, that the taking of one human life is justified in the interest of saving another.

What Sr. Margaret consented to was wrong.  We are forbidden from taking one life in order to save another (although, interestingly, this proscription is not found in Jewish theology).  But I am about to risk the sort of foaming-at-the-mouth vituperation I've received in the past when I've appeared on this blog not to take the hardest possible position on pro-life, by asking:  in this mother's situation, how many of us would have the heroic courage to leave our other children motherless?  In her husband's situation, how many husbands would willingly consent?  Exactly how many of us have the heroic virtue, faith, and selfless courage of Saint Gianna Beretta Molla (above) and her husband, Pietro?

In 2007 I had an ectopic pregnancy that ruptured.  I knew I was pregnant, but I wasn't exactly sure how far along I was, because I was nursing my baby at the time, and my cycles were all over the place.  One night I was overcome by a pain so intense that it had me first vomiting. and then immobilized; I was unable to sleep at all that night, because every breath I took sent stabbing pains up and down my spine.  It took several days, countless ultrasounds, and three emergency room visits to determine what had happened, at which point I was immediately wheeled in for emergency surgery.  In the meantime, when an ectopic pregnancy had begun to look like a likely scenario, I had gone to talk to my parish priest, to find out what treatments were permitted under Catholic moral theology.  He dryly xeroxed many pages from a book on the subject, gave them to me, and told me to call Monsignor Bill Smith, a respected moral theologian at St. Joseph's Seminary. 

Msgr. Smith died last year, and was lovingly eulogized throughout the Catholic press as a giant of his field.  I have no doubt that he was as they said.  My experience of him, however, consisted of a cell-phone call from the emergency room, during which Msgr. Smith expostulated at some length on the treatments that were and were not permissible to me.  Was I at a Catholic hospital?  I was not.  Well, then, beware of methotrexate, whose use was not permitted in the Catholic hospitals of the Archdiocese of New York, but was the subject of much controversy in other dioceses.  I could tell that Msgr. Smith was quite at home at the seminary lectern, and I supposed he had found his true calling as a scholar and teacher, because he seemed virtually devoid of any pastoral impulse whatever.  There was no condolence for a grieving mother, no prayer offered, no good luck or God bless; I was simply exhorted to do the right thing.  Fortunately for my soul, there was no need for methotrexate, as there was no trace left of my baby; the fetus had ruptured through my tube and perished.  So, while I had to have my tube and one ovary removed, no children were harmed.

What if things had been just slightly different?  What if my pregnancy had been discovered to be ectopic before it ruptured?  My OB worked at an Episcopalian, not a Catholic, hospital:  what if methotrexate had been administered, or what if the doctors had removed my tube with the fetus still in it, another treatment forbidden in that moral theology textbook that Father R. had xeroxed for me, as it directly harms the fetus?  (The fact that ectopic pregnancies are never viable doesn't count in moral theology.)  Would it have mattered to my body?  I got pregnant with the other ovary a couple more times, and lost those babies too.  Would it have mattered to my soul?  Well, yes, evidently it would have.

God, nonetheless, in His mysterious grace, allowed me to experience the loss of several of my unborn children through no fault of my own, unlike the loss of my first unborn child through my own fault.  I love Him no less for it.  As Robert Herrick's poem "To God" says:

Beat me, bruise me, rack me, rend me,
Yet, in torments, I'll commend Thee:
Examine me with fire, and prove me
To the full, yet I will love Thee:
Nor shalt thou give so deep a wound,
But I as patient will be found.

As for those who are inclined to condemn Sr. Margaret McBride, or me, or any of the usual suspects, I pray for you -- and I suggest that you pray also for yourselves -- that you will never be put to the test.  May God have mercy on us all.  May Saint Gianna Beretta Molla intercede for us. 

By the way, Bishop Thomas Olmstead of Phoenix did not excommunicate Sr. Margaret.  Canon law states that anyone who consciously participates in an abortion is automatically excommunicated (latae sententiae); Bishop Olmstead simply stated that fact.  If you have participated in abortion, please go to confession, and ask the priest to lift the excommunication from you.  Like the father in the parable of the prodigal son, God will run to you when He sees you approaching from ever so far off.

UPDATE: 
"Trying circumstances such as these are an invitation to ponder all we do not know. We believe that God wants both mother and child to live, but accept the possibility of other plans and even other—to us shocking—ideas, such as this one: What if that was all the life the mother was meant to have?"  Taking Jeremiah 29:11 as a template, Elizabeth Scalia (aka The Anchoress) explains the position of the Church quite beautifully here.  

Prisoners of Love

I wonder if the reason that some who seek comfort or confirmation in the Catholic blogosphere are outraged when they find blogs like this one, is the commonly-held myth that everyone is exactly like oneself.

Sometimes I fear that I have little in common with many of my most admired colleagues and co-authors on these pages (though of course I could be wrong about that, too).  I still mull over the accusation of the erstwhile suitor who denounced me in an email after reading a post here that he found insufficiently anathematizing of Obama back in 2008 -- an accusation that alluded to the "unspeakable crime" I'd committed against my own unborn child.  I do not deny the crime aspect of it, and I say this not to defend myself: but not everyone, even cradle Catholics, grows up knowing that abortion is a crime, much less an unspeakable one, and I was one such.

Not everyone's parents marched in pro-life rallies; some marched in the opposite direction, to a place where the bumper sticker that reads "You can't be Catholic and pro-abortion" would have been met with real incomprehension.  My father, for instance, was not only glibly and openly pro-abortion, as well as pro-pornography, while my mother suffered silently by; he was also a drinker and a philanderer, and during fights on these topics my mother would sometimes, in a dramatic gesture whose symbolism could not be lost even upon young children, throw her wedding nightgown out the window (I think she would collect it later, after things had cooled down somewhat).  And there is many a church in which abortion is never mentioned at all (I can't recall a single bus going down to Washington in January from my own childhood parish, for example, though it was very much involved in the Sanctuary movement).

Suffice it to say that if you grew up in a family in which all its members loved God and each other, and if you had the added benefit of receiving good catechesis, you should really consider yourself extremely fortunate.  You might also consider that those you see embracing positions of apparent evil often scarcely have any idea that they are doing so.  It's easy to forget that evil rarely displays itself in all its ugliness.  On the contrary, evil almost always appears as if it were good, and had good ends in mind; if it did not, a scant few people would ever consciously choose it. 

It would be so much easier to love one another if everyone really were like oneself.  But I suppose if it were that easy to love, it would not be such a dreadfully painful struggle to try to be a Christian.

As for me, I thought that if I got pregnant M. would love me.  Then, when he offered it as the only possible solution to our predicament, I thought that if I had the abortion he would love me.  I had no idea at the time that (as it later emerged in marriage counseling) seeing me in that state of abjection and woundedness had in fact, or so he said, inspired him to love me.  It was too late; I never trusted him again, though I did marry him; but I suppose a love whose building blocks were desperation, need, misguided passion, and the sacrifice of an unborn child must have been doomed to failure from the start.

Naked

In the 1990s, my first husband, M., had the type of day job that was much coveted among struggling New York artists.  He worked in the word processing center of a global investment bank, using the most arcane and esoteric features of Microsoft Office to create marketing materials that helped bankers pitch high-level investments to potential clients.  The work was highly skilled and well paid, and, best of all, the word processors didn't have to deal with the bankers themselves, for whom, it must be admitted, they had little respect.  That was the job of the word processing center supervisor, who was the liaison between the center workers -- all of them highly-educated, underemployed artists, or doctoral candidates who would probably never finish their dissertations -- and the bankers, who were generally first- and second-year analysts just out of college, living four or five to an apartment (but always in doorman buildings in tony neighborhoods) and working a hundred hours a week in expectation of Christmas bonuses that often far exceeded their annual salaries.

M. was very good at his job (he was good at everything he did), and he and his supervisor, a young black grandmother named Margaret, held one another in affection and esteem.  But his temper was such that, in those pre-iPod days, after he threw his Discman at his typing stand in response to a banker's unreasonable request and told Margaret to tell the banker to do the effing job himself, she said to him, "M., I love you, but I can't have you on my shift no more" (my friend Soprannie, who worked with M., was an eyewitness to this event).  After that, M. worked the evening shift.

Margaret was a born-again Christian who used to reminisce, not entirely without nostalgia, about her pre-conversion days of nightclubbing, promiscuity, and recreational drug use.  "Thank God for Jesus," she used to say.  " 'Cause if it wasn't for Jesus, I'd be bad."  We used to laugh at this, as if it were Margaret's standard shtick, but today at Mass for the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, I realized how starkly honest she had been.  The priest noted that the Bible begins with the story of a woman -- Eve -- and ends with the story of another woman, the New Eve, the woman in Apocalypse who is clothed with the sun and has the moon and stars at her feet.  I thought about the fact that the Bible opens in paradise, where the man and woman are naked before one another and are not ashamed, and how, by page three, it's all over:  the angel drives our first parents weeping from the valley of joy and delight with a flaming sword, and now we eat our bread mixed with ashes.

The old joke is that, if you look hard enough, you can find your own phone number in the Bible.  Well, I know mine is in there.  Like our first parents, I have been tempted with the Ur-temptation, the one that has us believing we can have power equal to God's, which is certainly the root of all the nightclubbing, promiscuity, recreational drug use, and so forth.  But the education in evil I received before my conversion was nothing compared to what I've learned about it since.  I suppose it takes an egregious sinner to sneak up in among the righteous and see how very, very many of them take the stance of the Pharisee in the temple, and yet do not see themselves reflected in that parable.  (This is true in a special way in the pro-life movement, which is full of post-abortive women who hesitate to speak openly the joyful news that they have been forgiven, for fear of the poorly-concealed horror in which they are held by some of their less-egregiously-sinful comrades.)  I myself have incurred scorn in the comboxes on this blog from virtuous Catholics, who appear to believe that I don't deserve to call myself a penitent, penitence being reserved, perhaps, for those who sin but lightly.  Well, wake up, people: man is fallen, and we're all naked under our clothes, and not in a pretty, Renoir sort of way, either.  In this season of penitence, it's best to admit that, if it weren't for Jesus, you'd be bad. Maybe you'd be bad like Margaret, maybe you'd be bad like me, or maybe you'd just find your own particular level of badness.  But there are few transgressions of which that the human heart is not capable, no matter how virtuous the mind that believes it controls that heart; and to the good people who say to themselves and each other, "I would never do that" (an assertion I've often heard made, for instance, about abortion, from those on both the pro- and anti- sides), I say, "How do you know?"  We should pray in all humility that we'll never be tempted to see that (or any other sin) as a good option.  As Solzhenitsyn said, the line between good and evil runs through every human heart.  That means yours.

Which is why this feast day is so great.  Our last chance, our true medicine, our only hope, was born to a young girl not, perhaps, unlike the one pictured above, in John Collier's startling painting of the Annunciation, who was just like us, except for the fact that God honored her by removing from her the indelible bruise and brokenness resulting from our first parents' devastating fall.  O Mary, conceived without sin, pray for us egregious sinners, who are the happiest of all people because we have recourse to you and your powerful intercession.

Now is a good time to revisit this stark, powerful performance of the old carol "Remember, O Thou Man."

Our Lady of Guadalupe and the Pro-Life Movement

Today is the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe, patroness of the Americas and also of the unborn. The pro-life movement has taken her as its own patroness for this latter reason.

I have no wish to delve into the politics of the pro-life movement here. To do so would be to duplicate the content of countless other blogs, but would do nothing to advance the cause. My fellow blogger Kyle Cupp, who has written extensively about pro-life politics from surprising and provocative angles befitting his background as a philosopher, is a good place to go for commentary that advances the dialogue toward the ideal state of healing.

All I have is my witness as a penitent post-abortive woman. This witness has been condemned by some commenters on this blog, who have suggested that, because I continue to speak of and to mourn my sin in spite of having had much else restored to me, I provide a destructive example to other post-abortive women. Although I do not know these commenters personally, I do know this: they are not post-abortive. And they do not read blogs written by other post-abortive women. If they did, they might find this one downright cheerful in comparison.

As my beloved Father Hermann Cohen, a fellow penitent and a great devotee of the Blessed Virgin, once said in a sermon, "We have been nailed as signposts before the Gates of Hell, warning others, 'Do not go this way!'"

My prayer to Our Lady of Guadalupe today is that she might move the hearts of the virtuous members of the pro-life movement to accept and embrace the fervent witness and participation of women like me. For there are many of us in the movement, including many who are not open about their penitence and its cause. Their reticence is the result of the reality that many others in the movement -- like many faithful Catholics, sad to say -- have an attitude toward penitence not unlike that of the Prodigal's older brother. It would do us all well to ponder the great mystery inherent in the fact that God forgives even great sin, and remembers it no more. Moreover, He rejoices more over the return of the penitent than over those who have no need for forgiveness.

I suspect that women like me could be the future of the pro-life movement, especially as the hearts of so many of our fellow citizens become more and more complacent about the sanctity of life. Indeed, it's not impossible that penitent post-abortive women could even in some way revitalize the Catholic Church in America.

H/T for the quote from Father Hermann: Fallen Sparrow

St. Dorothy

Kyle Cupp has a provocative post up, suggesting an approach to dialogue on life issues that controverts the culture-war paradigm. It got me thinking about Dorothy Day, whose cause for sainthood is being promoted by the Archdiocese of New York (they have a stylish website up to publicize it, too). I can't help but wonder if Dorothy Day's acclamation as a saint would ruffle feathers among American Catholics, who are already rather starkly aligned along the lines of conservative and liberal, orthodox and dissenting. These designations, however, are misleading; like most aspects of American Catholicism, they bear the taint of what Pope Leo XIII referred to as the heresy of Americanism. Most orthodox or conservative Catholics identify their spiritual beliefs with conservative political beliefs, while, conversely, liberal Catholics align themselves with liberal American politics. So conservative Catholics are pro-life, but many of them are harshly opposed to any governmental solution to ameliorating the lives of poor women who choose life, and they tend to be for the Iraq War and for capital punishment. Liberal Catholics, on the other hand, believe that abortion is a right, while condemning the execution of criminals and the prosecution of the war. Perhaps Servant of God Dorothy Day is just who we need to guide us out of this impasse.

Dorothy Day was a true political radical and a true religious orthodox, someone who sought to defend and protect the weakest and most vulnerable members of society. She endured the suffering of divorce and abortion, and underwent a dramatic conversion from communism to Catholicism. While her approach to aiding the weakest was transformed in light of her conversion, her dedication to justice and peace was unwavering throughout her life. It seems to me that her life and work are a true reflection of Catholic belief.

As far as the pro-life cause being a conservative one, this essay, published in The Progressive in 1980, was one of the earliest to make the powerful case that the protection of the unborn is rightly under the purview of the political Left. Read Mary Meehan's concise and cogent arguments in support of a leftist pro-life movement: "It is out of character," she notes, "for the Left to neglect the weak and helpless . . . . abortion is an escape from an obligation that is owed to another."

Some of my readers know that I grew up in an off-the-charts progressive family. I have never been able to understand why pro-lifers stereotypically oppose any measures, such as increased welfare and food-stamp benefits, subsidized childcare, and a guaranteed wage subsidy (supported, incidentally, by that great liberal Richard Nixon), that would assist the women who are most vulnerable to abortion but who courageously choose life. Should women and children be left to live in poverty? Should women already abandoned by the fathers of their children be further abandoned by our society? Is that Christian? Is it American? Dorothy Day, pray for us.