Karen Dudek January 29, 2019
I was in an all-girl Catholic high school, Immaculate Heart Academy, in 1973 when Roe v Wade was passed. We call it an all-girl school but we were technically all women. The 400 or so Freshmen, Sophomores, Juniors and Seniors had reached the common age of menarche. It is a word I wrote in my notebook that means menstruation. Despite our varying levels of maturity, we were able to produce babies. Some of the girls were even sexually active. Young as I was, I understood one thing clearly. From henceforth and forever, all our children were at risk.
One friend of a friend got pregnant our senior year. She was a wild girl, very pretty, smart, with uninvolved parents and an older drug-dealing boyfriend who had his own motorcycle. She was devastated by the news but never considered abortion. She was also devastated when she miscarried though we were all relieved. No violence was done. Life was respected, loved, and grieved. We lost touch with our friend after that and hoped she had learned something. But after growing up, I know that people don’t always learn the hard way. They still need someone to teach them or they will repeat their mistakes.
We were educated about abortion at IHA. We went on the March for Life around the Capital in Washington. We actually thought it would make a difference and not simply become a faithful tradition for the next 46 years. We knew that abortion was murder and a painfully gruesome one. On a side note, it is strange that no one ever talked to us about sexual morality. Isn’t that odd? I know because I remember listening intently for guidance from the elders. What does the Church teach on this? One nun, Sr. Antoinette mentioned in a Theology class, offhand, and I can recall her very words, that’s how carefully I listened, “Oh, you can’t just go off and make love to anyone you feel like!” That was it.
The Church was quiet about sex, which made no sense to me during the sexual revolution. And there had been our catechism teacher who told us that lying was OK. He prepared us for Confirmation with that gem. “If someone asks you something that is none of their business,” he told us earnestly, “then it’s okay to lie.” Little did we know that this man was the pastor’s live-in assistant and gay partner. That’s what the parents said when they got together to write a letter to the bishop I later learned.
When we look back at the sexual abuses and cover-ups in the Church since way back then, it is clear that evil was working its plan in various arenas. The Church did not speak out about abortion with the strength of a moral absolute, but made concessions that solidified abortion as an institution, with sentiments spoken even recently by the spineless New York Cardinal Dolan: ‘Abortion should be rare.’ Of course we all cringed at the vision of coat-hangers and back-alley butchering as activists argued for legality, Kermit Gosnell and others later disproving the safety thereof. Too bad we didn’t counter with the burned and pickled flesh of the saline victims, torn limbs and organs that are sold today. We actually bought the myth of the non-descript clump of cells that is still believed by some. I remember the Doonesbury comic author, Garry Trudeau, mocking the pro-life movement drawing a tiny scribbled dot in a cartoon uterus and calling it ‘kiddo’. (For the record, babies have to be well developed to be aborted.)
Abortion as compassion for the poor victim of pregnancy was not as they claimed, empowering for women. The opposite is true. It preys on the weak. Abortion sympathizers never sought to remedy the true source of the trouble, which is sin both corporate and personal. Holy Mother Church always had it right through her teachings though her ministers often failed. The compassionate lies are still going around, by the arrogant who claim to have greater mercy than God. The Judeo-Christian command, “You shall not murder,” is impossible to brush off and so, we had to devalue the fetus as not viable and sub-human.
Pro-lifers have tried to stop abortion with debates, books, films, and protests telling why abortion is wrong. We have sheltered the pregnant woman in crisis, offered testing, counseling, friendship, material support and prayer. We think we make progress and then a new enemy, chemical at-home abortions emerge. We try to organize a prayer group, outreach or protest, but many in our church are silent about the holocaust or even disparaging toward the pro-life movement calling it extreme. They stay on the sidelines. We are even shocked to learn that not all priests are Priests for Life. There is still much division in the world and in the Church.
We try to present the facts, but even with ultrasound, people are loathe to examine the truth inside the womb. Practitioners know perfectly well that there is a fully formed human being with head, heart, fingers and toes. They know the secrets, that they must force open the un-dilated cervix and often perforate the uterus. Yet even with the proof of photos or screaming ambulances, hard hearts find the truth to be more offensive than the wrong. They object indignantly that we are being too graphic.
One thing the Church has long stated, to her credit, is that abortion hurts both mother and child. Indeed, abortion for the 'health' of the mother ignores all the negatives: the pain, violence and trauma, the guilt a woman can carry all her life, the increased risk of the mother’s death, injury, cancer or suicide, the enabling of sex abuse and sex trafficking, the malpractice and racism in the business, even the expense, and we could go on. Worse yet is the denial of sin and the soul sickness that ensues. Mother Theresa said that abortion creates two victims: the baby and the mother’s conscience. What happens when we have a dead conscience?
On January 22, 2019, in an act that has stunned many in the nation, New York Governor Cuomo infamously added his state to a dozen others by signing the Reproductive Health Act. The name is a consummate camouflage for an extreme abortion bill legalizing the killing of full term babies up until birth. He did it to commemorate the anniversary of Roe v Wade and then celebrated it by lighting up the World Trade Center in Planned Parenthood Pink.
Perhaps they were surprised that the nation did not respond well. Happily, this Act is causing our eyes to open. If you don’t remember the rhetoric, here is a refresher: What began as a ‘private matter between a woman and her doctor,’ has spread to shock the entire world. I have personally witnessed the evolution of abortion from one lie to another and another: ‘abortion should be made safe’ (it’s not), rare (democrats have an abortion expansion agenda), for the health of the mother (there is no reason for therapeutic abortion), and now we come to bare bones, a woman has a right to kill her child whenever she wants to up until birth or infanticide. In this scary new world, we do not celebrate life, nor applaud the choice of adoption. Human life has become cheap and not worth dying for.
The mask has come off and there can be no doubt that the old arguments denying fetal humanity, defining human worth in terms of viability, and the all-encompassing health of the mother, were props to wait out a new generation that will accept co-habitation, contraception, and abortion as normal and necessary conventions of society and not grave sins.
Evil has a path and once it established its foothold in Roe v Wade, has only passed more laws, distorting law’s essence of justice and the common good, twisting it by pretense of compassion and health. The Christians see plainly that outside of God’s laws, this is always false.
The government’s unholy alliance with Planned Parenthood forces us into complicity, paying for abortion and contraception with our tax dollars despite evidence that their meager services are a straw man for abortion and that they aid in covering up sex trafficking and incest victims.
With the cooperation of the undiscerning masses, our government succeeded in bullying us into a legislation of bloodthirstiness that leaves many of us stunned and breathless. People are wondering suddenly, “What has become of our nation?” Midst the inaudible Church teaching on contraception, Obamacare stepped in to provide it and effectively tricked us into demanding it, in a brilliant diabolical modern bread and circuses act. Planned Parenthood happily collaborated knowing that birth control is cheap and that a sexually active person statistically will conceive, even with free contraception, within two years. The abortion giant has very deliberate goals and methods for increasing their supply. They are currently pushing their radical agenda on 13 year olds with a brand new sex app.
Why is the government so adamant to kill babies and go so far as to celebrate it? Why do they disregard the case for adoptions? Why can we not see progress on the pain capable or heartbeat bills? Why is there so much disparagement for motherhood and the family? We are recently inundated with anti-family propaganda and it is being pushed on us rapidly. We must realize that there are powerful people motivated not by compassion but by power, who want us to kill our babies.
As the government has created a demand for contraception leading to increased sexual activity, pregnancy, and abortion to kill and cripple our population, already reduced to a dangerous low, less than replacement level, the next atrocity will be forced abortions and euthanasia.
There is a new and final frontier now. Forty-six years have served long enough to shed light on abortion, what it is and what it does. And since we must conclude that it is intrinsically evil, we also have to admit we are in a spiritual battle. The sides are aligned and we have to choose where we stand.
In 1976, only a few years after Roe v Wade was passed, and before he was elected Pope, Cardinal Karol Wojtyla said at the 41st International Eucharistic Congress in Philadelphia,
“We are now standing in the face of the greatest historical confrontation humanity has gone through. I do not think that wide circles of the Christian community realize this fully. We are now facing the final confrontation between the Church and the anti-Church, of the Gospel versus the anti-Gospel…It is a trial of not only our nation and the Church but, in a sense, a test of 2,000 years of culture and Christian civilization with all of its consequences for human dignity, individual rights, human rights, and the rights of nations.”
While we do not know what this final confrontation will be exactly, the words of Sr. Lucia, the visionary of the Fatima apparitions, confirms: “There will come a time when the decisive confrontation between the Kingdom of God and Satan will take place over marriage and the family.”
We are seeing this confrontation today. Forty-three years since Cardinal Wojtyla’s prophecy, Professor of political science, Paul Kengor says in the National Catholic Register, “It seems that [now] we are facing the greatest historical confrontation humanity has gone through. And the Church and the anti-Church are at the center of the battle.”
Christians have no need to fear. Pope Saint John Paul II assured us, “This confrontation lies within the plans of Divine Providence.”
The Blessed Mother, in her messages at Fatima in 1917, told Lucia dos Santos, “In the end, my Immaculate Heart will triumph! My Immaculate Heart will be your refuge and the way that will lead you to God.”
How can we take refuge in the Immaculate Heart? Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger wrote that the 'Immaculate Heart' is a heart which, with God's grace, has come to perfect interior unity and therefore 'sees God.' He wrote, “To be devoted to the Immaculate Heart of Mary means to embrace this attitude of heart, which makes the fiat: 'your will be done', the defining center of one's whole life.”
We do not have to be perfect saints to consecrate ourselves to the Immaculate Heart of Mary, but if we are sincere, she will guide us to her Son’s heart. Entrusting ourselves to Mary's Immaculate Heart will protect us from the evils of the world and open us up to God's profound mercy for us and for the world.
We can pray to Our Lady as Saint John Paul II prayed in 1984,
"You who have a mother's awareness of all the struggles between good and evil, between light and darkness, which afflict the modern world, accept the cry which we ... address directly to your Heart. Embrace with the love of the Mother and Handmaid of the Lord, this human world of ours, which we entrust and consecrate to you ... We have recourse to your protection, holy Mother of God!"
"Immaculate Heart! Help us to conquer the menace of evil, which so easily takes root in the hearts of people today ... ."
“Deliver us from famine, from war, from sins against life, from hatred and every kind of injustice, and even from the loss of awareness of good and evil. Through consecration to your Immaculate Heart, let there be revealed to the world once more the power of merciful Love!"
Amen.