By Dave Andrusko
Editor’s note. This appears in the current digital edition of NRL News. I hope that you are reading the entire issue and forwarding stories to pro-life friends and family.
As an avowed opponent of abortion and firm believer in finding win-win solutions, I nonetheless understand the shrewdness of the incessant campaign to bolster abortion by enhancing its status from a legally protected right to a celebration as a positive, indeed even moral, good.
Variations of “Tell your abortion story” were and are a recognition that idiocies such as the “War on Women” had served their purpose and something beyond the tiresome rants about patriarchal oppression were needed. Or, you might say, if you can touch people’s hearts, you have a chance to take people’s eyes off abortion’s inherent ugliness and brutality.
Which is why the abortion machine hates nothing more than women whose “Abortion story” is not a celebration of the death of their baby but a recognition that they always be a mother—in this instance, the mother of a dead child. That’s not the approved narrative.
I ran across a post today headlined “’Women, don’t abort your baby,’ says post-abortive mother”. I’ve read many lamentations but this strongly affected me for more than the usual reasons.
The author is Paola Belletti and her story is based on what someone who posted on a friend of Belletti’s Facebook account wrote. The woman, identified only as “Marina,” begins with a counter-cultural assertion, if ever there was one: “Freedom is a serious thing. It is responsibility.” Responsibility, that is, includes what the impact freedom has on others.
No it isn’t, the culture virtually screams. In exercising freedom, the one and only responsibility is to yourself.
No one else has the right to insist you take into account the impact your freedom has on other. You and you alone get to decide what and whether to do something and nobody but nobody can tell you what you did was wrong.
Marina’s very next sentence illustrates how preposterous this is. “If you were to throw your child from the balcony, you’d suffer the consequences legally, but especially humanly. The ache would haunt you every day of your life.”
But to the increasingly frenzied, push-it-to-the-limits pro-abortion mind, even that is problematic. What if the child was born with serious disabilities? What if you already have children and this new baby—born with or without disabilities, but especially with genetic anomalies—is going to take a disproportionate amount of your time? Wouldn’t everybody, including the baby, be “better off”?
Maybe there would be an “ache,” but surely not one that would “haunt you every day of your life.”
But the poster on Belletti’s friend’s Facebook account has anticipated that rejoinder:
“Millions of anesthetized women are wandering the world when they could have enjoyed a single kiss with their sweet baby: maybe he would be sick or disabled, maybe healthy … but each baby is the expression of a truth that nobody can misunderstand … life is always life …
This post-abortive woman could mean any number of things by the phrase “Anesthetized women.“ They could be morally anesthetized, relationally anesthetized, spiritually anesthetized, or it could be as if their very soul was anesthetized.
The post is a fabulous read and I highly recommend you read it. I know that I will always remember her last words:
“On my knees I beg you: if my words lead you to save your child’s life, I will also feel that you saved mine.”