As usual, from After Abortion

(scroll down a bit)

I never was publicly pro-choice, but I sure did keep my mouth shut out of fear if the topic ever came up. I never cared if a politician I voted for supported abortion. I tacitly supported abortion because I thought, “How could I ever come out against it, having had one? I’ll be roasted alive.” And by both sides I might add, as we saw at the march on April 25.

And that, my friends, is how I think so many Catholics For Choice and other people who say, as I once did, that they’re religious manage it. A lot of us are PA, and cannot face it. There is no unified, serious, consistent outcry or effort against abortion and for women and children in the womb from the lay members of the Catholic Church, because it is cognitive dissonance to the max. We rationalized our choice so we wouldn’t get hammered in the short run. I can say there are “a lot” of us because I personally know so many Catholic women and men who have said this.

[For those who might argue they can be both, it really is right there in our Catholic Catechism, which I’ve referenced here before (pages 606-608, sections # 2270-2275, and # 2319, 2322-2323).]

We have the Kennedys (starting with JFK, Sr.), Daschles and Dodds of the nation to thank for some of this. Such pioneers.

Secondly, the Catholic Church clergy (perhaps others too) really haven’t made it 100% possible or easy for we who do regret to seek help at a Rachel’s Vineyard or similar resource. Connecticut has about 384,000 self-identified Catholic families. If there’s one adult woman in every family, the abortion facts from Allan Guttmacher Institute mean that there could be as many as 153,000 post-abortive women in these families (40% of all women aged 20 and up have had abortions, AGI said last year).

And not all of us are like Kate Michelman, who I believe calls herself a Catholic still. Norma McCorvey –the former “Jane Roe” of Roe v. Wade, now a devout Catholic– said she was terrified of going into a church at one time, afraid that the people there and God Himself would be so angry at her that the people would condemn her openly and God would cause the church walls and roof to collapse on her in punishment, killing everyone with her.

Many women who have aborted say they have this same fear of going back to church… We may want to stand up against abortion secretly, but are terrified of being punished as “hypocrites” by both sides, but especially by those who are pro-life.

I just received an e-mail from a self-identified “practicing Catholic, pro-life, pro-family, pro-marriage” reader of one of my columns who lambasted people like the post-abortive man in the column and me as being “still the most utterly selfish, immature and cowardly people I have ever encountered,” “anti-marriage and anti-family,” adding that our annulments were a farce dispensed by “liberal dioceses” and that we’ve “ruined enough people’s lives already” so we should not ever have relationships again and that all we’ve done by going on a Rachel’s Vineyard retreat is find ourselves “a cryfest and a sympathetic, liberal ear.”