Feminist writer Kate Simon recounts her life growing up in an immigrant neighborhood following World War I in her novels, Bronx Primitive, and its sequel, A Wider World. Abortions were commonplace. Her mother had 13 abortions, plus three children. The last of the three children, also a girl, was not wanted and was spared only because the abortionist refused to abort her for fear it would kill Kate’s mother. Although she begged Dr. James to “try just one more abortion,” he would not.
Years later, Simon herself had two abortions. After the second one, she hemorrhaged badly. She ended her book, A Wider World, with these words: “I never once thought of the fetus—neither as an object nor as a potential baby. It was nothing, only a forbiddingly expensive nuisance, a thing that signaled passage into my mother’s painful, gallant world.” As I closed the book, tears rolled down my cheeks. I thanked God that neither my mother nor I had made these terrible choices.
My mother was a 24-year-old elementary school teacher when she married my father, her school’s principal, who was 18 years older. Dad, widowed twice, had five daughters, the youngest of whom was almost two. Even though Mama had a ready-made family, both she and Dad wanted more babies, if God saw fit to bless them with more children.
When I was nine years old, I became aware of how difficult it was for Mama to carry a baby to term. She was always overjoyed each time she discovered she was pregnant, only to have the pregnancy later end in a miscarriage. Each time, she prayed for God to protect the baby inside her. One miscarriage brought an especially rough bout with septicemia. The pain and anguish in her face remain with me to this day. And once, when Mama had severe edema during a pregnancy and looked not at all like the mother I knew and loved, she sobbed, and told me that the doctor had suggested a “medical abortion.”
But Mama would have none of it. Her faith in God could not be shaken. She knew that He would look after her and bless her with babies, and if she must endure hardships, illness, and heartbreak along the way, so be it.
Some of my earliest and most precious memories of my mother are of her deep brown eyes tenderly looking down at the baby she held in her arms, and the wide smile that spread across her face. To me, she looked like the Madonna, gazing with wonder and joy at the Christ Child.
Before my mother’s family was complete, her miscarriages had outnumbered her seven children. Like the mother in Simon’s novels, my mother also worked. How she longed to stay at home with her children! Because of our growing family, though, money was always scarce. With frequent illnesses in the family, life was never easy. But, unlike Simon’s mother in her novels, each child in our home was always welcomed, wanted and loved.
Once, after my youngest brother Robert, was born, Mama heard about one of her friends who had an abortion because she didn’t want to “start over” with another child, now that her children were eight and ten. Mama immediately lined up the seven of us who were still at home. Holding her baby boy, one by one she kissed each of us and, with tears in her eyes, thanked God for our lives. Both she and Dad often told us that we, their children, were their greatest treasures.
My mother had her children long before that terrible Supreme Court ruling, Roe v. Wade, that recently celebrated its 30th year of providing a rationale for killing children—that women have a constitutional right to privacy, which includes the right to a legal abortion. At the time, this was called “consciousness raising.” I am grateful that my mother was the one who “raised my consciousness.” She taught me that life is always a precious gift from God and that destroying that life is a grievous sin.
Like Kate Simon in the 1920s, our age has its own abortion advocates. In an article titled, “Out of the Time Warp,” Anna Quindlen tells us: “The lives of women have changed. We know our rights and our limitations, what we can manage and what we cannot. And sometimes, sadly, that means and will continue to mean the end of a pregnancy.”
Kate Simon and her mother would find these modern-day words liberating and infinitely wise, as would most feminists and abortion advocates. My mother would be as appalled as I am. If she were alive, I know what Mama would do. She would assemble her precious children, her priceless gifts from God, and line us up and ask the pro-abortion advocates: “if these were your children, which of them would you have allowed to live?”
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