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The Freedom of Healing

Reflections After 25 Years of Project Rachel

by Vicki Thorn 

The recent celebration of the 25th anniversary of the founding of Project Rachel gave me pause to think about how the heart of America has changed concerning abortion over those years.

When I first began working in the pro-life movement shortly after Roe v. Wade made abortion the law of the land, it was a different landscape. We knew that there were some women who had had “back-alley” or illegal abortions, but we didn’t honestly know how many. I am not certain that we realized how long abortion had been a problem for humanity. Many tended to think of it as a sort of recent phenomena. We also thought of it as an American problem. Few people knew someone who had had an abortion, and the discussion was very much a moral and philosophical debate, often colored by ambivalence.

Now we know that abortion has been a problem for humanity for eons. The Hippocratic Oath forbade abortion not because they anticipated the problem, but because it was a problem even then. In Japan abortions have been around since at least the 1950s, and in Eastern Europe abortions were done in Communist times with frequency. Abortion is a universal human problem.

Abortions didn’t begin with Roe v. Wade; they just became sanctioned and more frequent. I have met people who had abortions in the Depression and World War II. Many of them were done by physicians very carefully to avoid prosecution. They were listed as a D and C (dilation and curettage), an acceptable medical procedure to treat “woman problems.”

Were there back-alley abortions as described in the horror stories? Of course, but I think there were many more “safe” abortions done by doctors and in hospitals than we will ever know. The oldest woman I have spoken to about her abortion was 94 years old. Often the elderly woman who is very agitated in her dying carries an abortion wound that has never been addressed. Priests have told me many times!

Early in the pro-life movement, no one knew much about the aftermath of abortion in women. It took me seven years to find enough knowledgeable people to sponsor the first Project Rachel training.

No one even considered the impact on men, with the exception of a sociologist who wrote a book on men and abortion the same year that Project Rachel began. No one paid much attention. Now we are aware that for every woman who has an abortion, there is a man involved who may also be suffering. The terminology of Post-Abortion Syndrome is everywhere. Two conferences on men dealing with abortion have begun new discussions, and they received national media attention.

Science has advanced, and now we know that there are medical consequences and psychological issues that follow abortion. We know that women carry cells from every child they conceive (microchimerism), and so an abortion is not comparable to an appendectomy. Motherhood is incurable, if you will. Now we know that these cells are passed on to subsequent children during pregnancy, and that explains why some people know in what seems an intuitive fashion that there are people missing in their families. Their biology tells them so.

We assumed that men were bystanders in pregnancy, solely there to impregnate. Now we know that as many as 60 to 80 percent of men will have symptoms of pregnancy with the mother of their child, if they are present. (Primitive cultures have recognized this for a very long time. The phenomena is called couvade.) And now we know that men undergo hormonal changes during the last weeks of pregnancy that permanently hardwire them for fatherhood. A father’s testosterone, which drops a great deal during this time, never returns to its pre-pregnancy heights. Abortion is never a “non-event”!

It is critical for us to recognize that in these years the abortion toll in this country has approached or exceeded 50 million – 50 million dead, and multitudes more wounded. We all know someone who has had an abortion, whether we know it or not. The Alan Guttmacher Institute, which promotes abortion worldwide, says that 33 percent of women will have had at least one abortion by age 45. They used to say the statistic was 43 percent.

Through the ministry of Project Rachel and other post-abortion outreaches, many of these wounded women have been healed. However, so many remain, and this fact must color how we speak about abortion in the public forum. We must keep in mind that those we speak to may have been affected, and so we must always speak of healing when we speak about the evil of abortion. As advocates for life, we must speak of God’s mercy.

Changes are afoot. Polls conducted by Pew and Gallup recently demonstrated the shift, showing that approximately two-thirds of Americans do not support unrestricted abortion as it currently exists. A poll commissioned the Knights of Columbus shows that 86 percent of Americans would significantly restrict abortion and that 53 percent believe that abortion does more harm than good to a woman in the long term.

I believe that these statistics speak to the lived truth of women who have had abortions and in their healing have been free to speak about the pain they have endured. It is their truth that will set us free!

 

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(The views expressed in this column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of Headline Bistro or the Knights of Columbus.)