One of the most frequently asked questions on Mother’s Day is: “Are you a mother?” What a tremendous pain that is for women who have experienced pregnancy loss or the death of a child in any way, including abortion. One woman said to me yesterday, “I don’t know how to answer that question. I had an ectopic pregnancy. I had a miscarriage.”
In churches, there can be both an overdoing it — including near every woman in a mothers’ blessing — but more often a missing this sensitivity.
People carry pain we don’t know about. And some of the most intimate pain. Maybe that’s a window the #MeToo business has helped reveal a bit. May it be a little opening too, to talk about the real effects abortion has on lives. There’s a website/movement/approach/network that I’ve been following for a decade or so called “Abortion Changes You.” Because it does. And let’s stop pretending otherwise. It hurts, not helps.
Jennifer Fulwiler and I talk about motherhood with a lovingly light hand here, trying to take some of these things into account, too.