You may have heard that that the old Full House gang is getting back together. As part of the publicity for the six-episode Fuller House featuring the reunited cast, coming soon to Netflix, John Stamos — known as “Uncle Jesse” to anyone who watched the ’90s primetime show — revealed in an interview with Howard Stern that a child of his was aborted.
I first read the details in a Marie Claire write-up about the interview, which quotes Stamos:
“I really don’t have anything to hide anymore,” he said. “My father passed away and I got divorced and it sent me down a wrong path. . . . I lost myself. I lost my sense of discipline, which my dad taught me so well. More and more I was just dipping into that dark place. It was getting darker and darker. It stunted my growth emotionally. Maybe I would be married with kids right now.”
Stamos never had children, but did reveal that he got a woman pregnant in his twenties. While she made the ultimate call to terminate the pregnancy, the decision was mutual.
“This was just bad timing,” Stamos said. “It really wasn’t my choice. . . . I think it was sort of a mutual decision.”
Obviously, it wasn’t Stamos’ choice because it wasn’t his body — but it sounds like he was appropriately supportive of his partner’s decision. As if we needed another reason to love him.
The Marie Claire item actually ends with an animated GIF of Stamos, nodding his head, and mouthing, “That’s right.” All the ladies are presumably supposed to swoon at the man of their dreams.
The reaction kinda stopped me in my tracks.
I was reminded immediately of a moment that made a big impression on me. It was the opening Mass for the year of faith and I had been invited to receive a message on behalf of every woman in the world. (Literally, that was what the invitation said. And you can imagine my guilt for not yet delivering it to the ends of the earth. But I’m far from alone there.) The message I received in October 2012 was actually one of a number of messages that Blessed Pope Paul VI had issued at the end of the Second Vatican Council. Fifty years after the opening of the Council, Pope Benedict was reissuing them verbatim as if to say: This wasn’t fully communicated and the world needs this now more than ever. The message is beautiful and challenging and a tragically untold story about what the Catholic Church really thinks about women.
The message ended with:
Women, you do know how to make truth sweet, tender and accessible, make it your task to bring the spirit of this council into institutions, schools, homes and daily life. Women of the entire universe, whether Christian or non-believing, you to whom life is entrusted at this grave moment in history, it is for you to save the peace of the world.
Wouldn’t you hope that a women’s magazine might lead the way here?
Reading the Marie Claire response to Stamos, I couldn’t help but also remember what Mother Teresa said about peace, to a Washington, D.C., audience that included Hillary Clinton, describing abortion as “the greatest destroyer of peace today.”
Pope Francis told an audience last year:
Marriage and the family are in crisis today. We now live in a culture of the temporary, in which more and more people reject marriage as a public obligation. This revolution of customs and morals has often waved “the flag of freedom,” but it has, in reality, brought spiritual and material devastation to countless human beings, especially the poorest and most vulnerable. It is ever more evident that the decline of the culture of marriage is associated with increased poverty and a host of other social ills that disproportionately affect women, children, and the elderly. It is always they who suffer the most in this crisis.
The crisis of the family has produced a human ecological crisis, for social environments, like natural environments, need protection. Although humanity has come to understand the need to address the conditions that threaten our natural environment, we have been slow — we have been slow in our culture, even in our Catholic culture — we have been slow to recognize that even our social environments are at risk. It is therefore essential that we foster a new human ecology and make it move forward.
But there was that flag of faux freedom in the Marie Claire item. In the Stamos interview with Stern, a window was cracked into darkness, and all that women’s magazine would do was affirm our coarsening culture.
It was just a little item on the Internet one day of the week, but it struck me as a harsh response, insensitive to pain. Stamos’s interview seemed to betray a latent regret or remorse — about a whole host of things. And all they could do is wave that flag?
You would hope a women’s magazine would want to encourage men to be heroes. To step up to the plate as fathers. Instead, there is cheerleading for a gravely wrong choice.
And while Stamos and the woman in this instance may have made their bad-timing call willingly, many women, especially those who don’t have the means of a Stamos, don’t feel they truly have a choice: Families, schools, jobs, and the culture all seem to prefer abortion to unplanned inconveniences in small vulnerable packages.
Is a culture of abortion, evidently necessitated by ‘bad timing,’ really something we can live with?
It’s worth asking: Is a culture of abortion, evidently necessitated by “bad timing,” really something we can live with?
I suspect she’s not up on John Stamos news, but Nancy Pelosi appeared to be reflecting just a wee bit about this all when Roll Call’s Melinda Henneberger seemed to catch her a little off guard with some fair and well-informed questions about abortion. Pelosi said she is not for “abortion on demand.” Would that no one would be. And yet, Marie Claire just might be. And Pelosi, for all practical purposes, is and has been.
We all deserve better than an affirmative animated GIF celebrating a culture of death and making light of a man’s talking about the dark places he’s been. John Stamos deserves better. The mother of his child deserves better. Women deserve better. Men deserve better. We can be better. Don’t we want to be? Stamos seemed to. Surely Marie Claire staff does, too.
Dare to dream about heroes and hold them up for celebration. Fathers guiding others on the path to life (first by protecting it), happiness, and flourishing, walking with women and children in challenging situations.
That’s a lot more than I ever expected to think about a Marie Claire item. But it’s long past time that we expected more from our cultural institutions — even women’s glossies. How about something sweet, tender, and accessible? Something that even works toward saving the peace of the world?
– Kathryn Jean Lopez is senior fellow at the National Review Institute and editor-at-large of National Review Online. She is co-author of the new revised and updated edition of How to Defend the Faith without Raising Your Voice (available from Our Sunday Visitor and Amazon.com. Sign up for her weekly newsletter here.