Coming to Terms With an Awful Truth

Everyone deals with their baggage differently, and let me tell you that I am no exception. Grief, anger, guilt, regret, shame and all the other miseries we carry around with us are sometimes visible to the world, or they are hidden, like a scar where a once-festering wound lay. Many years ago, just a week after I graduated from college, I did the unspeakable. I knew what I was doing was wrong, but I did it anyway; the worst way to commit a mortal sin, with full and complicit knowledge of the gravity of my actions. I was one of those people who believed that if you engaged in the act of procreation, you should accept the natural consequences of that action. I preached it to others, argued with those who disagreed with me, and self-righteously condemned those who thought otherwise. Then, I found myself in a situation I thought only happened to other people. How quickly I changed my tune.

I was the good girl who never got into trouble, studied, got good grades, and followed all the rules. At least that's the way it appeared on the surface. The little girl that the nuns tried to recruit early on for the consecrated life grew up and killed her own child. I hid that awful truth from a lot of people, but I never hid it from God. I lived in dire fear that I would be struck dead before I could get to confession. A person I was very close to at the time had a friend who was a priest that he knew I would be comfortable confessing, to, and I did. But a few things were wrong. The priest never made me say what I did, and although I said I knew what I did was wrong and that I was sorry, I really had no regret in the way that I should have. Frankly, I was glad to have the whole thing behind me. Even though I confessed, I was still in the darkness. "It was a terrible thing to do, but it was the right thing for me to do" was how I looked at it.

Many years later, a priest I came to be friends with held a novena leading up the Feast of Divine Mercy, and he talked about a man who went through life with a terrible secret that he could not bring himself to confess. Father talked about how this secret became like an abscess, and the longer the man hid it, the worse it became. "Don't be like him" was how he ended the sermon. I thought he was talking directly to me. So the next day, I went to confession, and in a trembling voice, confessed my sin once again, only this time I knew the gravity of what I had done. I had done what was convenient for me, never giving a thought to what God wanted. I acted against the wishes of the father of the child, who was vehemently pro-life, and I never told him what I had done. I convinced him that I wasn't pregnant after all. I might have fooled him, but God was another story.

Perhaps worst of all, I caused other people to enter into my sin. The person who took me for the abortion, and the doctor who performed it. When I heard that he passed, I had a terrible vision of him being held accountable by God for what he and I did together. I pray to this day that he sought forgiveness and that he was shown God's mercy.

I have talked about what I did at length with my oldest and assured her that I would do everything under the sun to help her if she ever found herself pregnant before marriage. "I don't think I could kill my own child, but thanks, Mom", was her reply I don't know if I will talk to the youngest or not about it, because she's on a very different path than most girls her age, so I will wait.

God has forgiven me not only for my actions but for my blindness in thinking that what I did "was the right thing for me". I believe that He wishes to use me, as He has others, to bring light out of the darkness and to prevent others from falling into the long dark pit into which I had fallen.

Some months ago, I got into a debate with columnist on a very liberal blog about abortion. She aborted a baby that she was told was deformed and might not survive long after birth, and she was happy she had done this so that if the child had lived, it wouldn't eat up resources, etc. That kind of thinking is typical of a certain mindset of people. Anyway, I wasn't accusatory or anything, just trying to get her to see the same things I was too blind to see - that all children are a gift from God, that His Will takes precedence over ours, and that the child she destroyed was a sibling of the little girl she has now. The pro abortion folks came out of the woodwork to attack the minority of us who voiced our opinions on that blog, and more than one of them said "You're probably another one of those hypocrites who thinks that by saying you're against abortion, you can hide the fact that you had one."

That remark stung momentarily, but then I came back to say that if you are trying to dissuade a child from taking up a life of crime, who would be a more credible influence on him? A goody-goody type who never did anything wrong, or an ex-con who saw the hardships of prison first-hand?

Every so often, the devil's voice will try to get to me with attacks similar to the one used by the woman who called me a hypocrite. "You know you only regret what you did because you're not all holy and pure like those other Catholics you aspire to be like." By trying to plant those seeds in my mind, he would try to effectively shut me up and keep silent on the subject. I put the lid on it quickly and I see that God can use me to prevent other women from making similar mistakes. I believe only God has the right to take a life, except in valid cases of self-defense, and I believe no one is beyond His redemption. To think otherwise would violate trust in His infinite mercy.

We all choose to do things in the manner most comfortable to us. I prefer to reach out to those who suffer from the same blindness I once did. Planting seeds comes more easily to me than wielding a hammer, so I leave that approach to others. A few years ago, a pro-life friend asked me when I was going to the go the March for Life in Washington. "When you go to an anti-war demonstration with me" I told her. She didn't say anything, but I did go on my first March with her two Januarys ago. I am still opposed to the death penalty, the Iraq war, euthanasia, and the destruction of embryos for stem-cell research, but I don't feel the need anymore to march for any of those causes. If we add up all the deaths from wars, violence and the death penalty together, it's doesn't even begin to approach the number of children who never had a birthday, a first Christmas or a trip to the zoo.

Humans are the only species to willfully destroy their own offspring in-utero. What should be the safest place on earth for an innocent life can now be a place of unspeakable violence. I still think we have a long way to go to support women who choose life over abortion, and I think we have not done enough as a society to protect the children we do have from violence, particularly the kind that comes from the hands of their own parents. How much longer will God tolerate this? I don't know the answer, but I know that I will do whatever I can to help others see the truth, because one way or another, it always outs.

Remember the words God spoke to Cain. "Your brother's blood cries out to me from the ground". We are our brothers' keepers, even the ones we can't see.