CHRISTINE writes from Germany:

There is something on my mind which I wanted to write you for a long time.

Following one of your articles about Emmie, the woman who sought advice in The New York Times when considering an abortion, a woman wrote to you about her mother who had had her son aborted by a doctor before she was married. The woman wrote that her mother regretted that for her whole life and never went to Communion because of it. You wrote that you could not understand her, because if she had confessed it she could have gone to Communion.

I think there are people who don’t find it hard to seek forgiveness from others or from God but can’t forgive themselves. I don’t know if that is a kind of sin but I think it is a sort of pride and a lack of trust in God’s mercy. Such people can’t admit to themselves that they are fallible and didn’t meet their own standards and expectations or those of their social or religious community. I think in a way it takes great humility to forgive. That is even more true for forgiving oneself.

Laura writes:

The person who has confessed and yet refuses to forgive himself lacks confidence in God. It is a form of unbelief. It takes humility – and courage – to trust that you are forgiven.

Here is the reader’s story of her mother, whose refusal to confess and forgive herself, along with her husband’s refusal to forgive her, created misery for years. 

What makes women think they can have an abortion and become better mothers later? How do they know they are making the right decision for future children? How do they know with such certainty there will be a good man in their future who will “understand what she went through”? I can tell you from experience how it really is for the subsequent children and the spouses of women who have had abortions because I come from a family where the majority of women had abortions before they had children they “wanted.” One of those women was my mother, who had a horrific backstreet abortion before it was legal.

You are completely right when you say the maternal instinct in women who have abortions is suppressed. I believe that it is not just suppressed for the time of the abortion, but it is compromised forever. Women who have abortions look at subsequent babies and think of what might have been. They compare the perfect infant in their imagination, the one they never had, with the imperfect child they do. I lived in the shadow of the baby boy my mother aborted and I lived with her depression over what she did. She had only girls, and cried at each of our births because we were not boys. She was not kind enough to spare us this detail, and she was not kind in many other ways. We were small children when we learned of the abortion during a particularly nasty fight between my parents. My father spit the truth about our mother out in a drunken rage then left her to explain what “abortion” meant. He did not “understand” my mother’s choice. He hated what she had done before he met her and he clearly held it against her. Her self esteem was too low to leave him and I am certain she did not think she deserved any better. As time went by, she drowned her sorrow in increasing amounts of alcohol and escaped by working many hours outside the home, leaving me feeling motherless at a young age.

We had little religion in our lives, and looking back, I think that is because my mother could never bring herself to confess in our Catholic Church what she had done. She would bring us to empty Churches to walk the stations of the cross alone with tears in her eyes. My religious life as a child ended after my First Communion, during which my mother remained seated rather than going for communion. As an adult I understand why she will not receive communion, but as a child, I did not.

There is one more way the abortion of my half-sibling hurt me. I am a patient at a Cancer Care Center because I have an autoimmune disease and am high risk for a deadly form of cancer that spreads to the incurable stage in most who get it before they know they even have it. The typical time from diagnosis to death is six months. I have blood tests for this every three to six months and if it ever comes back positive, I will be admitted for chemotherapy that day. My mother nearly lost me during pregnancy due to damage from the abortion and since there was nothing but x-rays to check babies back then, I had one X-ray after another in utero to determine if I was viable or worth trying to save. I had a lifetime of X-ray exposure before I was born but it was all the doctors could do back before ultrasound was available. No one knows what will become of me as I get older thanks to all that exposure, but my doctors are concerned enough that they will never release me from observation at the Cancer Care Center.

I have never written about this before. The secret is one that is carried not just by mothers but their children and spouses as well. Perhaps if more of us who were born to mothers who had abortions spoke up and told the world how it really was to live with these broken women, others would not be so quick to assume abortion was a guarantee of happiness for future children. Thank you for allowing me to share my story this one time.

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