The news broke yesterday that American sprinter Sanya Richards-Ross had an abortion two weeks before the Beijing Olympics. She regrets this and has said so publicly. I am really glad she has found healing and seems to be doing well. Here’s the thing: I don’t think it was any more or less dangerous for her to run with an early stage pregnancy than it was to run having had a surgical procedure. She felt she had to get rid of the baby in order to run–but was that the truth? Could the story have been that she won a gold and a bronze as a mother? Why wouldn’t that have been possible? For an early stage pregnancy it could be.

Abortion is a final act. Keeping a child presents some sacrifice, yes, but many more choices, to use that much loved word. You get additional choices, without the remorse and regret that is so common for women who have abortions. Friends don’t let friends–even Olympic athlete friends–get abortions.

I found this lovely little reflection from Alice von Hildebrand, which I thought would allow for saying Happy Mother’s Day to just about everyone. The idea is that we all have a role to play. We put a lot of emphasis on biological mothering, all of us, perhaps non-religious folks most of all. Hence the drive to IVF, for example. If we think more broadly about the term, and the need for mentors and spiritual mothers, then it takes a lot of pressure off.

I never had the incredible privilege of having children of my own, yet last year I was bombarded with Mother’s Day cards and wishes. If you don’t have children, for goodness sake don’t believe that you have to give up motherhood.

Motherhood is not only biological maternity. It is spiritual maternity. There are hundreds of people all around who are desperately looking for a mother. A number of people have come to me to tell me about their problems. I listen to them. And I love them. And I say very little. But they know that I care for them. In this sense, I have become their mother….

Spiritual motherhood is more important than biological motherhood. There are plenty of women who are biological mothers and yet are not mothers at all. Some consider their child to be a nuisance and an accident, saying “I didn’t want it.” Take for instance women who have an abortion for convenience’s sake. God offers them a tremendous gift but they say, “No, I don’t want it; it’s going to disturb me.”

From now on your daily prayer should be, “God, send me spiritual children and I will never turn any one of them down. The more the better.” Simple as that. Pray for the gift of spiritual children. It might very well be that in your beautiful desire to be a biological mother you have overlooked cases where you could have become a spiritual mother. Many of my students became my spiritual children, even though they were young adults already.

I liked this one. It highlights the humanity of the unborn in a subtle way. Pro-life folks like myself tend to be less than subtle, so this is a much necessary film that keeps it real (the miscarriage happens in a mall bathroom). It’s called 12 Weeks. At 12 weeks gestation a baby’s body is very evident. And what to do, then, in a mall bathroom? This family decides together how to say goodbye. Also admirable is the fact that there is a personal story for the father, the writer of the film: 

Not surprisingly, this film is a very personal one for Girard. He relates: “Having lived two miscarriages, I can say that these are really painful events for a couple trying to make up a small family. It is a sad situation, it hurts and I find that we speak little about it, especially that 10 to 15% of pregnancies end in miscarriage. It was after the birth of my daughter…that I decided to write 12 Weeks and to broach the subject.”

Abortion and miscarriage affect men, too. 

You can watch the film, here. 

Part of the miscarriage problem is that the parents carry these children in loving memory, but no one else knows.

Many evenings over the past months, my husband and I have been watching CBC’s A People’s History of Canada. It’s been fascinating to learn about those who built this country when there was nothing but wilderness. Without going into details, it took a lot. One pioneer woman was making the move from London, England to join her husband in the Canadian prairies in the late 1880s. First things first, she got all her teeth pulled and dentures made. The prairies held opportunity, but no dentists.

Our own grandparents had a different mentality of duty and sacrifice. They sacrificed a lot to make ends meet and raise families.

We don’t do that today, not always, anyway. The linked Chatelaine article is the story of a fairly well-established, married woman in her 30s who has two kids and aborts the third. She later goes on to birth her fourth.

It’s an old story: yes, we get it, EVERYONE is doing it. Thus we see how the abortion regime has no logic. For the point of stories  like these is to do two incompatible things: one is celebrate the normalcy of abortion for EVERYONE, the other is declare women who get abortions and talk about it to be very, very brave.

My point here is to reflect on her need to go public and thereby collectively redefine bravery by writing this article. She gets her accolades in the comments. (Although some, oddly, chastise her for having a glass of wine when she finds out (!?) and others criticize her for getting pregnant if she didn’t want to be. I don’t think I need to tell this audience that precisely none of these are a pro-life reaction.)

When she gives life to her fourth, it was without the sense of doom, she says.

When facing doom, when facing hardship, our response these days is to eradicate the hardship. In the past, the idea behind courage and bravery was to withstand and come out the other side a changed and/or better person.

One final comment: post-abortion, she mentions meeting up with a friend who “was trying to have another baby and had suffered several miscarriages. I didn’t dare tell her about my day.” I’ll say. I know what I would have said to her. And it wouldn’t have been pretty. But why not confess to her too? Is it because the burden of saying I just killed my child while you would so love to have one is awkward? Is that not part of the journey of sharing, together? Is this not part of “avoiding holding our collective breath”? Or might it just be indecent to put this on someone in that circumstance? And if, just if, it is indecent to do that in those circumstances, then why for the love of all things good in this world, is it AOK to force this indecency upon us via a widely read magazine?

This is why pro-abortion “sharing” is now–and always will be–counter-productive.

To conclude, some advice for pro-choicers: Abortion in your worldview is either normal, or brave, but it isn’t and can’t be both.

This may look cute, but it’s actually a defiant baby fist, raised high. If I could have found a photo with the third finger raised, I would have posted that. The problem with the pro-life movement is that babies can never join a union and protest their own mothers and fathers.

I recently listened to an abortion debate, hosted by a major Toronto radio station some years ago. The pro-choicer was the one talking religion and saying that abortion is nowhere mentioned in the Bible. (I just think it’s worth mentioning that while many pro-lifers are religious, we aren’t the ones citing chapter and verse in public debates.)

This pro-choicer seems to revel in the fact that abortion isn’t mentioned, therefore, it is licit or good.

I found myself thinking a couple of things.

One is this: Abortion may not be mentioned by name in the Bible. That would not surprise me. But there is a commandment that says not to kill. You can only circumvent that commandment if you don’t actually think there’s anything to kill in abortion, but most women know why they are getting an abortion and it’s because someone is growing that will become, in due course, a born child. So there’s that.

But the second thing I thought was this: There is no such thing as an unwanted person in the Bible. No concept of unwanted child. No concept of unwanted pregnancy. The central point, written throughout the Bible is of God using little, even unimportant people in big ways. Plenty of examples.

Now were I the debater I’m sure I would have had the presence of mind to say precisely none of this. But that’s what blogs are for. And I have one of those. So I thought I’d type this little thought up, and here we are.

God uses “unwanted” people for big things and has a purpose and a plan for each one of us. If mothers considering abortion knew this about themselves, I think it would help in avoiding abortion.

There’s a Slate article, available here, saying that new evidence shows women are very sure about their abortion decisions.

A friend called me to tell me about it (well, actually, she called about something else but ended up mentioning this article.)

My very first reaction was this: “I bet they didn’t look long term.”

So here’s the study upon which the Slate article is based. All you need to know I will summarize here, see bold:

Eligible women at four family planning facilities in Utah completed baseline demographic surveys and scales before their abortion information visit and follow-up interviews 3 weeks later.

It is self-evident to me that three weeks later women could feel confident. When I talk about abortion and mention the long term, I’m not worried about weeks. I’m worried about years.

Example: If a woman gets pregnant in university and has an abortion, it might feel like you got rid of the “problem,” which is essentially an issue of how can she can possibly do life under these circumstances–with a baby? But say fast forward twenty years to a time when she desires to get pregnant but can’t. Would the abortion decision not come back to haunt her? My guess is yes.

A three week follow up so you can declare abortion to be consequence free is ridiculously unfair to women and girls.

So, Slate: Let me know when someone does a study assessing abortion regret after 30 years. Then (after checking methodology) I will pay close attention.