ProWomanProLife welcomes Patricia Egan as a permanent blogging contributor.
Patricia Egan was born in Saskatchewan, but has lived for the past 15 years in Toronto’s west end. She completed a bachelor’s degree in history and French at Trent University. She went on to get a bachelor’s degree in both civil and common law from McGill University.
After graduating from law school, she worked on Bay Street, including six years of part-time work in the legal department of a “big five” Canadian bank. During this period she also had five children. “Contrary to what one might expect from the corporate world,” she says, “they were very good to me as a working mother.”
Trish “retired” from the practice of law in 2006. Since then, she has “a life of leisure” with her five kids (ages 3 – 11) and teaches a Canadian history class to the grade seven and eight class at her daughters’ school.
Trish came to be pro-life inadvertently through CBC radio. She recalls her mother listening to the coverage of the first Morgentaler trials on the CBC. When Trish asked what it all meant, she was completely horrified by her mother’s explanation. “And for some reason,” she says, “that reaction survived seven years of post-secondary education and remained an ongoing concern.”
The issue took on a new immediacy for Trish when her youngest daughter was born with Down Syndrome. “My husband and I encountered people who viewed my daughter as someone who had somehow slipped through the cracks of responsible health care and decision making,” she says. “We realized we are facing a world where people like her might not exist and that there is an ethos of human life positing this would be a good thing.”
At the same time, her daughter’s birth opened up a whole new world of kindness and charity and natural virtue, she says. “I discovered seeing those perceived as ‘weaker’ can draw out a kind of charity in the human spirit, a charity that is profoundly moving. In my opinion, each abortion eclipses an opportunity for someone to exercise such charity, and that is a second loss.”
Hanging outside her kitchen door is a poster with the words “Keep calm and carry on” – these posters were printed up by the British government in 1940 and stockpiled in anticipation of a Nazi invasion. “There’s something that I love in that story and having the poster on hand reminds me to, um, keep calm and carry on. Can’t put it much better than that,” she says.
PWPL looks forward to Trish’s blogging when she finds a calm moment.
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