Mother’s Day is today and millions of women will receive gifts from husbands, children, boyfriends, and significant others. According to Fox Business, an average of $172 will be spent on each mother, including countless roses in churches, mosques, and synagogues. Sadly and unjustly forgotten in this celebration are the American women that have lost a child to abortion.
This post by Thomas Leveson of the Boston Globe evokes the sacred bond of love that exists between a mother and a child. It reminds us that, spiritually speaking there is not one person in the womb but two. Born or unborn, we are all in a state of being and becoming and life is not just about a single decision such as that to terminate the life of an unborn.
In Veronica Roth's novel Allegiant, her hero Tris Prior speaks of what love is and how it involves a perpetual choosing "I used to think that when people fell in love, they just landed where they landed, and they had no choice in the matter ... but it's not true ... I don't just stay with him by default, I stay ... every day that I wake up, I choose him over and over again."
Perhaps this is the deepest lie in the worldview of those that advocate freedom of choice, that there is a choice that we can make that can break these sacred bonds once and for all that killing is an easier choice than being a mother. I think it's more like getting a cheque from a company that gives pay day loans.
Jenna Cook of Yale University was abandoned by her own mother in China. She grew up in Massachussets and in the summer of 2012 returned with her adoptive mother. She writes "I went to China to find the mother who abandoned me on a street corner. Instead I became the focus of an entire nations buried pain."
In Veronica Roth's novel Allegiant, her hero Tris Prior speaks of what love is and how it involves a perpetual choosing "I used to think that when people fell in love, they just landed where they landed, and they had no choice in the matter ... but it's not true ... I don't just stay with him by default, I stay ... every day that I wake up, I choose him over and over again."
Perhaps this is the deepest lie in the worldview of those that advocate freedom of choice, that there is a choice that we can make that can break these sacred bonds once and for all that killing is an easier choice than being a mother. I think it's more like getting a cheque from a company that gives pay day loans.
Jenna Cook of Yale University was abandoned by her own mother in China. She grew up in Massachussets and in the summer of 2012 returned with her adoptive mother. She writes "I went to China to find the mother who abandoned me on a street corner. Instead I became the focus of an entire nations buried pain."
Once a mother, always a mother. My ex wife Martine lost two children to miscarriage, in 1986 and in 1989; I do not think she has ever forgotten those children, even more devastatingly on January 5, 2006 we learnt the news of the sudden death of our adult son, Joseph. Such pain is a dull aching anguish that stabs to the heart, like the dagger with which the Nazgul stabbed the hobbit Frodo on Feathertop on the Lord of the Rings, it is a death that keeps on dying.
We do not have the right to believe that we are forgotten by our children; I will certainly never. Science fiction author Ursula K. Le Guin went on to write her great novel “The Left Hand of Darkness” after having an abortion. Catholic social activist Dorothy Day had an abortion, she went on to have a second child, founded the Catholic Workers Movement to help the poor, and recently had her memory celebrated (along with Martin Luther King and Thomas Merton as three outstanding Americans) by Pope Francis during his visit in 2015.
According to the report dated November 15, 2015 “Abortion Surveillance in the United States - 2012” by the United States Center for Disease Control and Prevention, adolescent women aged 18 or 19 accounted for 66 percent of adolescent abortions; this corresponds to one abortion for every 30 women in this age group.
According to another Center for Disease Control and Prevention report, in the year 1959 cited one out of 20 children was born to an unmarried woman. In the year 2000, that had increased to one out ofthree. Three thousand years ago the Bible admonished us to provide care for widows and orphans. Courage is not only physical, it does not only involve killing. So ... just where are the brave American men to marry these mothers and adopt their children?
In the year 2000, I was praying in silent witness against abortion in front of the Planned Parenthood clinic in Sunnyvale, California. I held a blue velvet banner with a picture of the Virgin of Guadalupe and baby clothes and toys attached to the sign. I will never forget the African-American women that approached me and told me that she had been forced to have a second-trimester abortion by her then boyfriend. She had already bought baby clothes and was drawn to the sign; she needed to tell what had happened.
America should inform themselves from the statistics of the Center for Disease Control and Prevention. Let’s accept that like the methamphetamine and prescription drug abuse epidemics, abortion is a public health issue with a socio-economic dimension. For too long it has been treated as as a matter of individual legal rights, as something to be punished, or simply a moral problem. Let's be pragmatic, eschew bitterness, and be silent no more. According to the United Nations Population Fund 2013 report “Lest more girls go missing” there is a missing girl for every ten boys in India due to sex selective abortion. According to the 2015 CDC report cited above, African-American women accounted for 36.7 percent of abortions; this is triple the ratio for Caucasian women in the population.
Pope Francis writes in “The Name of God is Mercy” that “the important thing is to get back up, not to lie on the ground licking your wounds.” There are many families that cannot have a child and who would be willing to help someone who was not able to provide for a child of their own. Until 2006, the Archdiocese of Boston was able to provide adoptions; there is no reason that this cannot be the case again. There are many mental health counselors that can help these women heal if our government would recognize that people can be hurting.
Let’s remember that it is Mother's Day and that there are suffering mothers and fathers among us. It is a time for mercy as well as for celebration. I am so grateful to my own mother for having chose to bring me with five other children into this world, I am so grateful for her sacrifices.
As Paul Simon wrote in his 1964 song Sounds of Silence “Silence like a cancer grows” and more of the same is not a solution to any problem.
