Debunking the Myth of Consequence-Free Sex
Eleven Women and Their Abortions
Every abortion is different, but the killing of a living child in his or her mother’s womb is never a trivial act. The true stories below are about eleven women, ten of whom I’ve known personally, and one, Dorothy Day, was a public figure now being considered for sainthood, who aborted one or more of their children. (Some of the names have been changed to protect their privacy.)
In the stories that took place in the 1960s, my friends and acquaintances and I were living out the principles of the sexual revolution—which I repudiated after I saw so many casualties.
This article is revised and expanded from a version published in Latin Mass Magazine. Two other related versions were published at Catholic Stand. I previously published the story of Dorothy Day’s abortion at Dappled Things.
SCROLL DOWN FOR MORE
Don’t think to yourself this is a “merely” Catholic religious opinion.
The realities staring us in the face in these stories do not need religious faith to be understand.
SCROLL DOWN FOR MORE
This article takes a look behind the smoke screen of pro-abortion sloganeering, examines some actual reasons why women are aborting their babies by the millions every year, and considers what must be done to debunk the illusions behind this present-day slaughter of the innocents.
For one thing, it is important to realize that all the woman whose stories are told in this article. except one, were using birth control at the time they conceived. We as a society would be well advised to re-examine the myth of consequence-free sex, which is enabled by the associated mythology surrounding contraception as a reliable preventative for abortion.
#1: Leila's Abortion Story
The first woman I ever knew who had her child aborted was Leila, a Finnish-American college graduate. It was about 1964. Leila was twenty-two. Leila wanted to keep her baby, and she wanted the baby’s father, who was over thirty years old, to marry her. But she was pressured into “getting rid of it” by her “old man.”
At the time this sad story played out, I was nineteen, working for a dollar an hour as a file clerk and saving to go back to Brandeis University after dropping out after my freshman year. I was renting two rooms on the same floor as Leila did in a rundown townhouse in the south end of Boston. Dartmouth Place, the literally dead-end narrow street where we lived, was lined on one side by brick townhouses.
Boston’s South End and its rows of brick townhouses had been a fashionable neighborhood in the 18th century, but by the time we lived there the neighborhood was a haven for bohemians, artists, and homosexuals, who lived among poor families from all sorts of ethnic backgrounds, all of whom were on the fringes of society. The townhouses on our little street were being held for development by real estate speculators who often rented out individual rooms for low rents. The speculators were waiting for city redevelopment funds, which when they came some years later turned the South End into a gentrified toney neighborhood far too expensive for our kind of people any more.
Leila’s “old-man” Harry was a bohemian-type undiscovered artist. Although he was from a long-time New England family, he grew up to be a decadent bohemian. I could tell you stories—which he boasted about and others told about him—but the other details of his decadence don’t belong in this story. He was tall and rangy with a Lincoln-esque face, thick nappy black hair and beard. He was balding a bit, which emphasized a bulging forehead.
Leila was thin, blond, and ethereal looking with translucent skin. She looked a lot like today’s movie actress Gwyneth Paltrow. Leila had graduated from one of the many Boston area colleges, before she came to live in our version of Desolation Row. She had a job she hated where she was unappreciated, but I don’t recall what she had majored in and what kind of work she did.
Harry was one of the men in the bohemian circle that included the man I later met and married, who had found out they could make a good living working as bridge painters during the warm months and collecting employment the rest of the year, when they were happy to fill out the forms and pretend they were looking for work and spend the next of the year doing their thing.
Harry bragged to his friends that Leila was “the grooviest chick he ever met,” but even though he was besotted, he was adamant that he never wanted to marry or support a family. They were using birth control. When Leila conceived a child he didn’t want, he asked around and got the address and contact information of a doctor somewhere in New York city who did illegal abortions.
One night I heard crying and loud arguing and the sound of things being thrown coming from Leila’s rooms next door to mine, and I peeked out and saw Harry beating a hasty retreat down the stairs back to the townhouse he owned a few blocks away. But he would not give in. When she finally agreed to have the abortion, she was grief-stricken and angry.
After she came back from New York, pale and distraught, she told me the abortionist told her she could never have another child. She didn’t say why he said that. Maybe he had punctured her uterus or damaged her cervix. These kinds of injuries are not uncommon during abortions. As one abortionist wrote in an article I read in 2016, anyone who does abortions who says he or she never perforated a woman’s uterus is a liar.
After the abortion, Leila moved, or more accurately, fled, far away from Harry. He soon took up with another blond, a short giggly go-go dancer he met at a local bar—who I ran into when I had to walk around them when I found them making out and breathing heavy on the stairway on my way down to the front door of his townhouse, when I was later one of several others who rented a room from him.
A few years later Leila mailed me a photo showing her holding and nursing a beautiful blond baby girl. She’d colored over her bare breasts in the photo in blue ink.
In spite of what the abortion doctor had told her, Leila was fortunately able to conceive and bear this child after she met a man who loved and married her. Maybe the abortionist had lied about her supposed inability to ever carry another child because she had been so sullen, angry, and protested so much. Maybe she pulled away just when he was painfully inserting the cold instrument through her cervix on its way to pull pieces of her child out of her, and he got angry. It’s hard to know.
SCROLL DOWN FOR MORE
#2: Dovana's Abortion Story
The second woman I also knew around the same time as Leila who had an abortion was Dovana. She was actually just a teenager, a headstrong runaway high-schooler about sixteen years old with a bowl cut of shining brown hair. I met her one night to my surprise when she crawled in one of my windows, which overlooked a fire escape landing that I shared with the rooms on my level in the townhouse next door. She was still living at home then. I have no idea how she got involved with that scene.
Dovanna’s “old man” at the time, a hip black man everyone called Charlie Brown, rented that whole townhouse. Charlie Brown had covered the walls of his pad with burlap, for grooviness sake, and he always had the best parties. He also had the best pot, which he sold by the kilo.
That night Charlie had started pretending he didn’t know Dovana when his pregnant Jewish girlfriend arrived at the party from her dorm at Simmons. After Dovana was left on her own, a snaggle-toothed bridge painter named Dak started pursuing her, and she climbed out onto the fire escape and knocked on my window to ask if I would let her in to help her get away from him.
Within a month Dovana had run away from home in Worcester 45 miles away, with the help of a man named Peter in his twenties she’d taken up with. Peter and a friend had arranged to meet her outside of her parents’ home and they rode the rails both ways during that escapade. Peter and Dovana then lived together in a room in the townhouse on the other side of mine from Charlie Brown.
Below the dark brown bangs of her bowl cut hairstyle, Dovanna had a remarkably pretty round face, with innocent looking brown eyes. Her only flaw was her strangely thick ankles. She said that kids at school used to say she had elephantitis. She hid the minor deformity with the bell bottom pants that were in style, and Peter didn’t seem to mind.
After Dovana returned home pregnant, I heard to my surprise that Dovana’s Catholic Lithuanian-immigrant parents brought her to the same illegal abortionist who had aborted Leila’s baby. (We all passed the illicit information around, proud of our secret knowledge.)
Dovana told me later she screamed throughout the abortion. The pain was horrid.
The abortion doctor’s nurse told her to shut up, that she deserved the pain because of what she had done to get into that fix and because she was killing her child.
I heard later that Dovana soon got pregnant again with another man and her pragmatic parents paid to have the second child aborted also, before she got married in her twenties, but I never heard anything more about her.
#3: Oprah’s Abortion Story
The third woman I ever knew who had an abortion was Oprah, not the TV star, but a wildly loose-living woman I came across when I was living in a sublet seventh floor walkup apartment with a tub in the kitchen and a high tank toilet in the hall that I shared with my poor neighbors on Avenue C in the Lower East Side of New York City. I was working uptown at Value Line Investment survey during a summer vacation between two semesters after I had returned to Brandeis. It was the summer of 1966, and I was about to turn twenty-one. I can’t say how I met this Oprah of the Lower East Side streets, but I do remember she told me she had six abortions. Six! I was shocked by her lack of self-control. I now of course am shocked that she had so many partners so casually and got rid of her babies so easily.
To my mind the thing “everybody” knew back then was that if you were going to have sex, you should use birth control. What we didn’t know then is how often birth control fails even when used perfectly.
But Oprah didn’t use any. She just kept on having sex, getting pregnant, and aborting the babies. I don’t know how she procured the abortions or if she could afford the cost, since she had no obvious means of support. She told me she had induced some of the abortions herself, with a coat hanger.
#4: Lori's Abortion Story
The fourth woman I encountered who aborted her child was Lori, a college-educated Methodist minister’s wife with two children. It was the late 1960s, I was about twenty-one, and she was twenty-eight. We met in California. I had dropped out of Brandeis again after I met the man I eventually married, and he and I had taken a long road trip together and ended up in San Francisco at the end of the so-called “Summer of Love.” I can’t say how I met Lori either.
I used to jokingly call her a “blond bombshell” because she was both blond and perky and flirtatious and so unlike my stereotypical idea of a minister’s wife. From what she told me, most of the straight respectable men in her peer group played around with adultery as if it was a sport, and they liked to compare scores. She wanted to be one of the players, rather than be one of those played upon.
Lori had numerous affairs, one with the family doctor, and she always used contraceptives. I was shocked that she bragged that the doctor charged her a greatly reduced rate for the office visits, during which they had sex! Maybe he should have been paying her, I thought, but at least certainly he should not be sending bills for her husband to pay, even at a reduced rate.
She told her stories of her secret life to me and my old man because she concluded that since we were living together and part of the hippie movement, we would approve. But to the contrary, I believed in faithfulness in marriage, although I believed in divorce. If she didn’t like her husband, she should leave him. She shouldn’t cheat on him. I didn’t say those things to her though, just thought them.
Lori conceived the child with the family doctor while her husband was away for months doing research for his Ph.D., so she wasn’t going to be able to pass the baby off as his. Dr. Tom thought he took care of their problem when he aborted their child in his medical office one Saturday when the nurse wasn’t there.
But then Lori fell gravely ill from an infection caused by the abortion. He stayed with her day and night and took care of her until she recovered. (Now I wonder where the kids were during all this.) Lori later told everyone in her family about the “good” doctor’s dedication in coming to their home and caring for her and the unspecified infection. But she told only me and my “old man” about the real cause of the infection or the reason why Dr. Tom went so far out of his way to make sure she didn’t die.
Lori later divorced her husband, Ted, and she never married again.
#5: Betsy's Abortion Story
The fifth woman I knew who aborted a baby was Betsy. I first met her when we were fellow art students at Moorhead State, a college I attended part time after I had moved with my then-husband and baby from San Francisco to northern Minnesota, near Fargo, where his parents lived, in the early 1970s.
In 1975 or 1976, I was about thirty when we met, and she was about eighteen. By the time Betsy told me the story of her abortion, I had moved again after a divorce, to attend the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis and finish my degree. My two children were six and four years old.
By that time legal abortion was widely available in all states.
I had returned to the Catholic faith by then, through the merciful grace of God. Betsy’s willingness both to be used by several guya and to get rid of her child made me upset, because by then I realized the emotional and other types of harm that kind of immorality caused and the grave seriousness of abortion. Having my babies took away any blindness I once had about the reality of the defenseless human beings that had lived and grown in my womb since the time of their conception.
I had been still living in northern Minnesota, taking art classes at Moorhead State, when fellow students Betsy and her boyfriend Sven had met and had kind of fallen into bed together. There was no talk of love or marriage. Like many other women after the sexual revolution, Betsy hid her desire for commitment because she didn’t want to scare her man away. What folllows below is an abbreviated version of their story, which I wrote about in detail here at this Substack post:
When Susan found out she was pregnant, soon after she moved to the Twin Cities after graduation, they both were surprised. She took the Pill regularly, at the same time every day. People back then didn’t realize that an unexpectedly high percentage of pregnancies occur even when a woman is using the Pill perfectly. From charts I’ve seen directly from Planned Parenthood, 6 out of 100 women get pregnant every year, even when they take it exactly as prescribed. The next year the same odds apply again. Planned Parenthood, of course, is always there to “help” with aborting the babies of the 6% who conceive playing contraceptive roulette each year, for a fee, of course.
Relying on the Pill was a crap shoot and hardly anybody knew the gamble they were taking. If the dice landed against them, people trying to live the bogus promises of sexual freedom who found themselves about to become parents usually didn’t realize that they were simply part of the cohort of statistical failures of contraception. They would blame themselves. Quite often the man would blame the pregnancy on the woman.
A blessed event was no longer seen as such, but as a trap, a failure, a punishment.
Many a man taking advantage of the “free sex” zeitgeist secretly or not so secretly believed that if a woman got pregnant, she was vilely trying to trick him so she could get him to marry her. She was trying to possess him, which was made her evil in his eyes and deserving of any means he took to get rid of responsibility for her and the child. And for the woman’s supposed duplicity, which was usually just in his own mind, many men felt they were justified in getting as far away from the believed-to-be-conniving female as possible.
Sven was, Susan told me, not like that. He was very supportive. He “helped” her a lot, she said. For one thing, he helped pay for the abortion.
It was her choice he told her. Nobody should force her to carry a child that wasn’t wanted. He didn’t want to be a parent. But if she did, that was her choice. If she didn’t, well that would make things easier.
He also “helped” her by coming down from where he lived in Fargo to take her to Planned Parenthood. She was surprised by how much like a cattle call it was when they got into the big waiting room. Everyone was told to arrive at the same time, and then they had to stand in line to pay. Each woman was called in for her abortion in order of when she had paid.
Sven held her hand in the waiting room before and afterward he stayed around for a few days to comfort her.
Think of it: that scene in the 1970s of two young parents comforting each other after they paid someone to kill their child, without a shred of conscious guilt would have been unimaginable to most of us only a few years before—until the "sexual revolution" had turned the hearts of parents not only against their children but also against their own emotions.
Even though Betsy believed she was doing the right thing, she was surprised at her body’s reactions. She felt as though her body betrayed her by grieving, in spite of how her mind was made up, and even though she didn’t believe that the child was anything more than a clump of cells. Her breasts were tender and leaked milk. Her whole being was longing. She couldn’t stop crying for days. After she recovered enough to go back to work, Sven gave her a long hug and went back to Fargo. Later Betsy married an accountant she met at work, who told her he respected her decision to abort her baby. After my kids and I went to her wedding, and to the reception in the Methodist church basement, where we drank the non-alcoholic punch, and ate the white sheet cake and candied almonds, I soon lost track of her too.
#6: Katherine's Abortion Story
A sixth woman I knew who had an abortion was named Katherine. I had met her through a friend in the East Coast, and one day she called me in California and said she was coming out to have an abortion. She was educated; she came from a well-to-do family with deep roots in Connecticut, and she could easily afford to fly out and stay for a few days in California. In the late 1960s, California allowed abortion years before the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision that removed nationwide restrictions on abortions in 1973. Katherine never told me what it was like for her. She stone-facedly aborted her baby because she emphatically didn’t want to have a child with her philandering husband, who she was in the middle of divorcing. After Katherine went back to Connecticut, I never heard from her or about her again.
#7: Maureen’s Abortion Story
The seventh woman I’ll tell you about, Maureen, was Boston-area raised by an Irish-American family. She and I had met when we were both graduate students in American Studies in Minneapolis in the mid 1980s. I was in my mid-thirties, working towards a Ph.D., and Maureen was about twenty-five getting her Masters. By the time she got pregnant she was married and working as a special needs teacher, while her Danish-American husband Carl was working as a ward clerk at a hospital. They also were using contraceptives. Maureen was afraid of angering Carl, afraid he wasn’t “ready” for a baby.
I could tell Maureen was hurt and bewildered by the way the few men who she had dated before Carl had been intimate with her and then abandoned her casually. Her taciturn husband has resisted marrying her, and she had been hurt thinking he too thought her unworthy of being his wife. Maureen avoided the moral qualms that might have been lurking in her mind after her Catholic upbringing, when she spontaneously miscarried the child before the abortion appointment. She decided to go ahead with the procedure to make sure her womb was empty.
Maureen later told me that she had been surprised how the abortion workers treated women at the clinic because she thought they would be helpful and kind, since their stated goal was to "help women in crisis pregnancies." It was like a cattle call. All were scheduled to show up at the same time and told to get in line to pay.
Maureen forgot her insurance information, and she had to wait until Carl went home and fetched it. She and many other women who had come in when the clinic opened in the morning had to wait for hours. When they finally got around to her, the nurses were gruff and unsympathetic about the pain she experienced. After the procedure, Karen heard other women crying out from pain and sobbing from sorrow around her.
She later had two more children after her husband Carl was “ready.” They are both retired now, still married.
#8: Madelena's Abortion Story
The eighth woman, Madelena, was a fellow technical writer in a big computer company where I worked after I was recruited from Minnesota and moved back to California, to Silicon Valley in the early 1990s. I was in my middle forties and she was about ten years younger. Madalena was a non-practicing Jew. She told me she had an abortion a few years before we met, when she had gotten pregnant using contraceptives while she was “dating” a man she had no intention of marrying. Madelana told me she was “just using him.”
She didn’t tell me anything about what the abortion was like for her, just that she felt relieved. Madelena broke up with the child’s father afterwards. She later married Aaron, another secular Jewish man. She reluctantly had two children, a girl and a boy, with him, and she adapted resentfully to the demands of motherhood because she believed that typical female roles keep women down. Even though she never figured out what she wanted to do with her life, she felt it was important to not be prevented from following her dreams.
Like her mother, Madalena, the daughter, her oldest child Rory rebelled against her feminine identity, from the time she was a toddler. The rebellion went so far that Rory now calls herself a “he,” and with the help of the sex change industry lives as a smaller than usual man with a scraggly beard. When Madalena sends me Christmas letters, she writes about her two sons.
#9: Araceli’s Abortion Story
I met Araceli, the ninth woman, when I interviewed her for an article about the Mexican restaurant she owns near where I live now in San José. I love people who tell good stories. She told me about how her spunky Mexican-born mother loved Hollywood movies and had convinced her grandmother to move to the United States, because she was beautiful and determined to be a movie star. Instead, she met and married Araceli’s handsome Mexican future father in Arizona, and when the couple moved to San José together, they started a restaurant.
Araceli told me she took over the restaurant when her mother died, and like her mother she was not home much at all. Her parents divorced. She was very lonely as a child, and when she got pregnant with her first of three husbands, she didn’t want to have a child to go through the same loneliness.
That same mistaken idea is very prevalent now, that to prevent a child from having a difficult life, it is better to abort it.
All of the reasons these women had for aborting their children contained an unnoticed flaw: It is never justifiable for any reason to take an innocent human life.
#10: Dorothy’s Abortion Story
This tenth story is about Dorothy Day. When I was in my forties, I became interested in her, and I read everything I could that she had written and as much as I could find before the Internet about her life. Day, as you might know, was an atheist, bohemian, peace activist, Communist, and journalist who converted to Catholicism in 1927, similar to my own conversion after I tried out the lifestyles promoted by those who don’t believe in God.
Day turned her deep sympathy for the sufferings of the oppressed, which had been behind her mistaken enthusiasm for Communism in her youth, into a zeal for aiding the poor based on principles that she learned from the scruffy-looking, itinerant, philosophizing, Catholic Frenchman, Peter Maurin.
Maurin had appeared unannounced at the door of her flat one day in New York in December 1932, one day after she prayed to God to show her how she could best continue her work for social reform as a Catholic. Day saw Maurin as the answer to her prayers. Maurin convinced her to work with him towards his vision of a peaceful “green revolution” (a term he coined), a revolution that would create a society true to Christ’s teachings about feeding the hungry, visiting the sick, sheltering the homeless, and so on, a society in which each human would be recognized and loved as another Christ, economic inequalities would not exist, “in which it would be easier for men to be good.”
Together they founded the Catholic Worker newspaper and a series of Houses of Hospitality and farms for the outcasts in society. For the rest of her life, Day, like Maurin, led a self-sacrificing penitential life of prayer, poverty, and humble service, and she now is being considered for sainthood.
While reading about her life, I was surprised to discover how strongly a version of Freud’s theories had already taken hold of American culture, even in the first decades of the twentieth century, when Dorothy Day was a younger woman. Many of her Communist and literary friends, such as activist Emma Goldman and playwright Eugene O’Neil, were proponents of “free love,” which — as many wags have accurately observed — isn’t love and it isn’t free. Blithely claiming that chastity gives rise to unhealthy sexual repression, many of them acted out that belief by being promiscuous.
In that amoral milieu, in 1918, when she was 20, Dorothy Day gave herself with all her heart to a devilishly attractive womanizing writer, named Lionel Moise, a newspaperman who Ernest Hemingway said taught him how to write, but who now is mostly remembered only as the man who didn’t love Dorothy Day and forced her to get an abortion, and worse . . . .. You’ll what was worse if you keep reading.
When she got pregnant by Moise in 1919, she knew he would abandon her completely if she did not abort their child.
After four months of anguished vacillation about what to do, she told him she was pregnant, and they arranged an illegal abortion. She wrote a fictionalized version of her experience in a novel, The Eleventh Virgin. Even though she tried to destroy all copies of the novel after she converted, years later she handed a copy to a biographer saying, “It’s all true.” In the novel, Day wrote about her fictionalized self that she was too proud to go home, face her mother’s disapproval, and keep her baby, but not too proud to cling to the man who did not want her or their child.
Later she told an acquaintance in a conversation reported upon in America magazine:
“You know, I had an abortion. The doctor was fat, dirty, and furtive. He left hastily after it was accomplished, leaving me bleeding.”—“Dorothy Day and Abortion: A New Conversation Surfaces”
Moise was supposed to pick her up afterwards; she waited in pain outside in a dark alleyway from 9 to 10 p.m., but he didn’t show up. She made her way to his apartment in a cab to find he had packed up and left her with only a note. He wrote that he couldn’t be expected to sympathize, since she was only one of God knows how many millions of women who go through the same thing. And she couldn’t expect him to limit his freedom and become just an average married man. As she later wrote, she realized she had sacrificed her child so she would not lose her man, and in the end she had lost them both.
Dorothy got an infection from the abortion and sank into sickness and deep depression. She tried to commit suicide, twice. Then for years she was afraid that she would never be able to conceive another child. It is said that abortion was “the great tragedy of her life.”
Most people only found out about Dorothy Day’s abortion after her death. The fact that she never spoke publicly against abortion is being used by some to claim she was not against it. But she realized the Church’s wisdom after she converted. She wrote in a Commonweal Magazine article in 1973, when she was seventy-five that once a reporter asked her position on birth control and abortion.
“My answer was simplistic. I followed Pope Paul. . . . Thank God we have a Pope Paul who upholds respect for life, an ideal so lofty, so high, so important even when it seems he has the whole Catholic world against him.“A Reminiscence at 75,” Commonweal, Aug. 10, 1973. ↩
Day was referring of course to Humanae Vitae, a document which Pope Paul VI published in 1968, five years before she wrote the Commonweal reminiscence. In Humanae Vitae, the pope restated the Church’s perennial teachings against both artificial birth control and abortion.
When she became a public figure, Dorothy Day resolved not to crusade against abortion because it might seem hypocritical if it came out she had one herself. She had learned to her dismay that a young woman who had somehow learned about Dorothy’s abortion justified having an abortion herself because Dorothy had done so. Day was afraid that public knowledge might lead other women astray who might also take her much-regretted abortion as an example to follow, instead of as a violent act against both the woman and her child, which, although it can be repented and forgiven, can never be undone.
I am concerned that Dorothy Day’s proposed sainthood may be used to support the false idea that Day did not deplore her early bohemian lifestyle and the abortion she had during her youth before her conversion.
I’ve already seen evidence that some pro-choice “Catholics” are constructing a false narrative that if this woman who had an abortion is declared a saint, then the Church would be admitting that abortion can be a justifiable choice for women in difficult situations. Those who claim Dorothy Day was not opposed to abortion should have a hard time getting around the fact that Day was one of the signers of a protest against legalized abortion on June 28, 1974, eighteen months after it was legalized. It read:
“The January 22, 1973 Supreme Court decision on abortion deprives all unborn human beings of any protection whatever against incursions upon their right to life and has thus created a situation we find morally intolerable, and one which we feel obliged to protest. . . .
“From the point of view of biological science the fetus is an individual human life. The social sciences may attempt to define ‘fully human’ in a variety of ways, but their findings are inconclusive and, at best, tentative and certainly supply no basis for determining who is or who is not to enjoy the gift of life. No one has the right to choose life or death for another; to assume such power has always been recognized as the ultimate form of oppression.
“A primary obligation of civil society is to protect the innocent. A legal situation such as now exists in the United States, making abortion available upon demand, is an abdication of the state’s responsibility to protect the most basic of rights, the right to life.” —”The Catholic Peace Fellowship Statement on Abortion” (June 28, 1974). ↩
The protest letter included many statements about the need for compassion for women who felt driven to abort their children, but in no way did the signers portray abortion as anything other than the intolerable destruction of the life of a human being.
About the callous misuse of women’s sexuality that leads to the callous practice of abortion, Day wrote this in The Catholic Worker in September 1963, forty-four years after her abortion:
“Sex is a profound force, having to do with life, the forces of creation which make man god-like. He shares in the power of the Creator, and, when sex is treated lightly, as a means of pleasure, I can only consider that woman is used as a plaything, not as a person. When sex is so used it takes on the quality of the demonic, and to descend into this blackness is to have a foretaste of hell, ‘where no order is, but everlasting horror dwelleth.’ (Job x.22).”—Dorothy Day, “On Pilgrimage – September 1963,” Catholic Worker, Sep. 1963.
What does the Catholic Church think of Dorothy Day’s abortion? Here is one indication, a quote by the late Cardinal John J. O’Connor, Archbishop of New York, who proposed Dorothy Day for sainthood, and who said that one day she may be the patron saint of women who have had abortions.
“Made pregnant by a man who insisted she have an abortion, who then abandoned her anyway, she suffered terribly for what she had done, and later pleaded with others not to do the same. But later, too, after becoming a Catholic, she learned the love and mercy of the Lord, and knew she never had to worry about His forgiveness. (This is why I have never condemned a woman who has had an abortion; I weep with her and ask her to remember Dorothy Day’s sorrow but to know always God’s loving mercy and forgiveness.)”
#11: Roseanne's Abortion Story
One more story: this eleventh woman, Roseanne, took the Pill. Roseanne believed the hype at first that the Pill was a great invention. Roseanne had grown up knowing that intimacy between men and women belonged in marriage, but when she went to college women were being told they could and should “do it” without being married and without fear of getting pregnant. A lot of what Roseanne believed came from feminist philosopher, Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, which Roseanne read at the age of 15. De Beauvoir’s philosophy compared a woman who expects a man to marry her in order to be intimate to a prostitute. The Pill would supposedly put women on an equal footing with men.
Roseanne had been convinced abortion was a good thing too, influenced by another book called, Our Bodies, Our Selves, and by the pervasive “progressive” thinking of the era.
SCROLL DOWN FOR MORE
Our Bodies, Our Selves is an insidious book with far-reaching evil effects. Many college women were radicalized by Marxist feminist claims about the patriarchal society’s oppression of women and about how women must be freed to express their sexuality without being compelled to have children. An enormously popular tract, Women and Their Bodies, which was later published as a book under the title Our Bodies, Our Selves), was written by twelve women who met at a women’s liberation conference at Catholic Emanuel College in Boston, and then began circulating the stapled 193-page book in 1970 with the following claims that women need birth control and abortion to be free:
“Unless we can freely decide whether to continue a pregnancy, it is impossible for us to control our lives, to enjoy our sexuality, and to participate fully in society.”
“If we are going to have sex, we must use contraception.”
“Birth control fails . . .”
“When a woman is pregnant, her ‘body has been taken over by a thing and a process which is not within [her] control.’”
“Every baby born should be wanted (there should be free, legal and safe abortions to any woman upon her request alone).”
“The existence of any abortion laws (however “liberal”) denies this right to all women. . . .”
And, the authors also falsely claimed, any feelings of guilt or shame or sorrow after abortion are due to societally imposed “shackles of superimposed guilt feelings.”
Roseanne bought into what she later came to see as a skewed idea of women’s freedom, which she later came to realize actually degraded women and denied them the full expression of their inherent sexual nature.
While she was away from the Catholic Church, Roseanne saw and experienced for herself that the new immorality was worse for women than the old, supposedly oppressive, morality. Women were now expected to “free” themselves by the extreme measures of suppressing their emotions and their fertility. Men were taking advantage of the situation by brazenly using women, and in the circles she ran in, women usually did want to get married and have children, but the men didn't.
Roseanne eventually returned to the Catholic faith, partly because she saw that living by the world’s values was so hurtful and so destructive to her and to everyone around her. She came to see that God’s laws were protections instead of restrictions. She greatly repented her enthusiasms for the sinful ideals and the sins of her youth.
Roseanne was relieved she herself had not had an abortion, because if she had gotten pregnant before she met the man she married, she would probably have aborted her child, and then she would have had that also to regret for the rest of her life. Then later she found to her sorrow that she had actually probably had an abortion, maybe several of them, without knowing—because she had been taking the Pill.
How the Pill Causes Abortions
Drug companies had originally released the Pill without knowing how it worked. They knew the hormones in the Pill suppressed ovulation, and that was good enough for them to bring it to market and start making money on it. Eventually, researchers figured out that in a certain percent of cycles, an egg would be released anyway, which is called breakthrough ovulation. Sometimes that egg would become fertilized.
These hormones do not always work by "preventing pregnancy" as is commonly claimed, since pregnancy begins at conception, not implantation.
The hormones used in the Pill effect changes to the woman’s body that almost always prevent successful implantation after conception. Because they cause the death of a conceived human being—they are actually abortifacients that put an end to a pregnancy. (The word abortifacient, "that which will cause a miscarriage,” comes from the Latin words: abortus "abortion" and faciens "making.”)
The Pill thins the lining of the womb (endometrium), making it inhospitable, so a fertilized egg is usually not going to be able to attach to the mother’s womb. In addition, the effects of the Pill can speed up the fertilized egg's travel time through the fallopian tube and result in it arriving at the endometrium when it is still too immature to implant. Both of these effects mean that if a child is conceived while the mother is on the Pill, the child will die for lack of nourishment.
The medication abortion is done by ingesting two pills. The first pill does the same thing the Pill does at smaller doses, which is to prevent a fertilized egg from implanting itself in the uterus and developing. The second pill is taken the next day, to cause the body to go into labor and expel the no-longer-living child.
Once when I wrote on Facebook about accounts I’ve read of women who took the medication abortion pills and were surprised and shocked by the pain and extent of the bleeding they experienced and dismayed when they see their recognizably human child in the toilet after the second pill has done its work, someone responded that the latest date the medication abortion can be taken is 10 weeks and the child is not recognizably human then.
SCROLL DOWN FOR MORE
It’s a visually poignant commentary on the reality of abortion that one way to show abortion in sign language is to first gesture as if rocking a baby, then close your hand and make another gesture as if picking the baby up and throwing it away.
SCROLL DOWN FOR MORE
Common Themes
Did you notice any common themes in the abortion stories? Most of the women in these stories wanted married love and children, but the man did not. Most of the women felt, invaded, rightly so, by the abortion procedure, and several reported serious pain. None of the stories I’ve heard of involved men wishing to prevent the abortion of the child they fathered, and who were devastated because they don’t have any rights to stop the murder of their child, but it does happen often. I found this quote in a Psychology Today Article from 2022: “Common experiences among men whose partners have an induced abortion include ambivalence, loss, grief, guilt, self-reproach, a feeling of responsibility, depression, anger, sexual dysfunction, depression, and posttraumatic stress response.” Some grieve for years.
Another common theme in these eleven stories: Most of these women had been regularly using contraception when they got pregnant. Planned Parenthood statistics and other studies show that more than 50% of the women who get an abortion were using contraception regularly when they conceived.
Tell that to people who claim if we want to stop abortions, we need to make more contraceptives available.
Almost every woman of childbearing age who is "sexually active" is currently using contraception. The false belief we can separate the conjugal act from the conception of children has led to most of the millions and millions of abortions that have been committed every year since abortion was legalized.
How come women are still getting pregnant when they don't want to be? Because contraception predictably fails even when used as directed.
“In fact, 3 out of 10 women in the U.S. have an abortion by the time they are 45 years old.”—Planned [Un]Parenthood.
This should be a horrifying statistic. Plus many have multiple abortions.
Another horrifying statistic for me as a Catholic is that women who say they are Catholic are more likely than Protestants to abort when they conceive an unwanted child, and over all they have the same number of abortions as women of other faiths and of no faith at all, in spite of the Church’s teaching of the serious sin involved in procuring or enabling an abortion. The Church teaches that abortion is a violation of the universal, exceptionless moral law against the direct taking of innocent life.
Decent people of all religions and no religion have been convinced by slogans to think of abortion as a “women’s right” having to do with women’s “reproductive health.”
But actually, the truth is that abortion legalization was pushed to begin with in many cases by heartless men like Hugh Hefner who wanted to use women as playthings. Whatever its source, the indoctrination was so successful that most women believe we have to stifle the full emotional and physical expression of our sexuality so we can be equal to men. Wanting to be loved and married are the new social sins.
The slogans hide the reality. In reality, abortion is an often painful and devastating procedure that invades a woman’s most sensitive area of her body. Every aborting physician knows that almost every woman cries after the killing of her child. The contracepting and fornicating way of life that is supposed to free women—but instead requires them to deny both their desires for married love and their motherly love for the babies in their wombs so far as to pay someone to kill their own children—that is not free at all.
Abortion is a violation of the universal, exceptionless moral law against the direct taking of innocent life.
I recently ran across this quote in the best article I ever read about the contradictions of the current sexual immorality, by a woman who like me once believed it was a necessary thing:
“If you were in charge of a nature preserve and you noticed that the pregnant female mammals were trying to miscarry their pregnancies, eating poisonous plants or injuring themselves, what would you do? . . . You would immediately think, ‘Something must be really wrong in this environment. . . . Something is creating intolerable stress, so much so that animals would rather destroy their own offspring than bring them into the world. You would strive to identify and correct whatever factors were causing this stress in the animals.
“The same thing goes for the human animal. Abortion gets presented to us as if it’s something women want . . . . But women do this only if all their other options look worse. It’s supposed to be ‘her choice,’ yet so many women say, ‘I really didn’t have a choice.’”—Frederica Mathewes-Green. “When Abortion Suddenly Stopped Making Sense: Roe v. Wade -- Abortion Won the Day, but Sooner or Later That Day Will End.”
What Is the Answer?
Obviously, more contraception isn't the answer. A radical return to reality is, by which I mean a return to the way of life followed by most Christians before 1930, when the Anglican Lambeth Conference tentatively approved contraception for a husband and wife, but only when they had "grave" reasons. It didn't take long for this exception for hard cases by Anglicans became the norm for almost everyone.
Only the Catholic Church has stood fast against the evil of contraception, which has opened the gates for a flood of many other evils. This evil practice changed how men treat women and how women view themselves and the children that are the fruit of their wombs. In this contracepting and fornicating culture, the conception of a child is frequently a cause for shame and fear and self-loathing, because women often feel rightly that they are going to be blamed and abandoned.
Pope Paul VI's Predictions
A previously unthinkable change has also happened in our thinking, and the safe haven of the mother’s womb has become a killing field. Read the prophetic predictions Pope Paul VI made about the consequences of contraception in Humanae Vitae.
“Let them first consider how easily this course of action could open wide the way for marital infidelity and a general lowering of moral standards. . . . Another effect that gives cause for alarm is that a man who grows accustomed to the use of contraceptive methods may forget the reverence due to a woman, and, disregarding her physical and emotional equilibrium, reduce her to being a mere instrument for the satisfaction of his own desires, no longer considering her as his partner whom he should surround with care and affection.”
If he knew then that contraception was going to pave the way for a holocaust of astounding numbers of abortions, Pope Paul VI might well have added this prophecy:
If people believe they can and should separate the act of intimacy that belongs in marriage from love and from the creation of offspring, what will they do when contraception predictably fails? Will they not then seek to rid themselves of the shame, inconvenience, and expense of the child, by then committing the great sin of abortion? Could it be possible that millions of unwanted children will come to be routinely killed in their mothers’ wombs, and that society will begin to celebrate this kind of killing as if it was a positive good instead of a heartless crime that calls out to God?
The truth of these matters must be spoken and written about and spread far and wide. We need to counteract the lies that have blinded many good people, even many Catholics, to these evils of our day. It is no exaggeration to say we are sacrificing our babies by the millions to Moloch, the modern idol of consequence-free sex. We live in an era that says that intercourse between a man and woman only has meaning only if both parties want it to, and that our babies in our wombs are persons only if we want them.
SCROLL DOWN FOR MORE
Future generations will look back on our acceptance of abortion businesses in the centers of our cities the same way we look back on those Germans and cooperators in conquered countries who accepted the loathsome stinking Nazi death camps outside their towns. Mark my words. We need to judge ourselves before we are judged.
May God grant the massive conversion of minds and hearts that is needed for these delusions to be exposed as the work of the father of lies, which it really and truly is.
-----------------
On Safe Sex:
“The only safe sex is real sex, sex done for the procreation of life and the sanctification of love.
“It is fantasy if you think that authentic sexual life can be divorced from the procreation of life and a lifelong consecration of love. Then you are mocking an anthropological fact. Once you have done that, then you are opening yourself to all of the contradictions of the natural order. Once you start telling people they can have safe sex, you are telling them that they can live a fantasy and pretend it’s real.
“If people want to engage in aberrant sexual activities, well, by all means then they are free to do so. They are free to pay the penalty.”—From “The World According to Father George Rutler” by William J. Grace, Crisis Magazine, March 1, 1990.
SCROLL DOWN FOR MORE
Perhaps we do need the Catholic Faith to understand this phenomena. Without God and obedience to traditional moral principles, our best-laid plans lead to destruction. Ideas become ideologies, and ideologies become idols. Atrocities are perpetrated to worship the Idol, in this case, the Idol is the Myth of Sex Without Consequences.
The atrocities committed in its service include the unsexing of women by thwarting the full expression of the fertility and longing for committed family love that is built into their bodies, minds, and souls, and to ignore and belittle the feelings of the children’s fathers. The concomitant atrocity is that human babies are treated as mistakes to be blotted out if they are conceived in spite of all the potions, pills, barriers, and poisons of planned unparenthood.
And then there is the unmentioned pain, the humiliation, the invasion of the most vulnerable area of a woman's body, the heartbreak of trying to rationalize the pain of child murder, and even the expense, plus having to pretend that a tough modern woman is able to rise about all that and that abortion is what women really need to make sure they are free.
So painful to read about the lies, death, and destruction. So beautiful to see the transformations. Thank you for sharing the truth, for your witness to the light of God’s plan for sexuality.