Guarding The Gate
My father died in 1998 at age 79; my mother was just months shy of her 103rd birthday when she died in 2021.
Their lives taught a simple lesson about why anti-abortion legislation is failing across the nation.
They had their own very personal versions of Philadelphia-born Irish Catholicism.
In the closing years of his life, Daddy attended daily Mass and ardently prayed for the death of the world’s dictators. At my diaconal ordination, he was mesmerized by eighty-four-year-old Bishop James Edward Walsh, who spent eleven years (1958-1970) as a prisoner of the Chinese communists. Over the years, my parents hosted more than a handful of missioners (some who had been tortured in Latin America) who told stories of the brutality of leftist and rightist regimes. With close friends in the earliest Cuban exile contingents, Daddy loathed dictators, especially Castro.
If he had his way, he would guarantee their eternal damnation.
[EDITOR’S NOTE: I have already called and made reservations in Hell for a number of dictators and I call twice a year to confirm them.]
He was also firm in his belief that – provided they were good and loving - parents of adopted children were guaranteed direct and immediate admission to Heaven. They were, he insisted, following the example of St. Joseph, who accepted Mary and her baby as his own. St. Joseph was my father’s favorite in the Second Trinity.
My parents’ theologies – or spiritualities – were born of friendships and personal contacts. Sometimes on the verge of a spiritual intimacy.
Certainly, fund raising for the Marian Center, a revolutionarily whole-person oriented facility for children and adults with intellectual disabilities. The Center was established by a right-off-the-plane community of Italian nuns who expected every resident to live up to their fullest potential and exceed the “limits” “the world” placed on them. Foundress Sister Lucia Ceccoti was a powerhouse once-met never-forgotten
The children of several close friends were among the earliest residents of the Center and the stories and struggles they shared and the intimacy of their friendships affected a part of my parents’ hearts about neurologically different children of God.
Perhaps because, after his retirement, my mother desperately needed to get him out of the house, Daddy spent one day a week peeling potatoes at Mother Theresa’s Missionaries of Charity soup kitchen. (By her own admission, Sister Veronica, the head of the Missionaries community, once became so angry about how much potato he wasted that she “had to go to confession.”)
It was that up-close contact with the homeless that made my father more empathic (and an inveterate and unrepentant purloiner of hotels’ little plastic bottles of shampoo and conditioner and fragrant soaps – “for the ladies”).
For more than twenty-five years my parents opened their home for one-hundred to one-hundred-and-fifty folks for Christmas Eve Mass. “The door opens at seven o’clock,” my mother, who started baking Christmas cookies in early November, declared. Ex-convicts, active and recovering addicts, friends and strangers. All were welcome. And, despite not understanding the disease, through contact my parents developed an empathy for men and women with alcohol and drug addictions.
For years, in the days before cell phones, my mother accepted phone calls from the clients of her oldest son, a priest with a Psy.D. in Clinical Psychology. She’d listen – sometimes for long periods of time, get names and phone numbers and assure desperate teens and adults that she would contact “Dr. Flynn and have him call you as soon as possible.”
Contact nurtured changes of heart and new empathies for both of my parents.
Contact with women whose lives are condemned to poverty and desperation by unwanted pregnancy or rape-induced or simple ignorance-based pregnancies (“I didn’t know I could get pregnant the first time I had sex” – Yes, we’ve both heard that as priests and too many times.); being a parent of daughters whose lives might be irreversibly changed; contact – albeit through mainline media and not in person – with a 10-year-old rape victim who was forced to leave her Indiana home and obtain an abortion in Ohio; or the tragedies of women forced to endure weeks or months of carrying babies with unformed brains or medical conditions that – at best – will result in only minutes or a few hours of indescribable pain.
These contacts are changing, energizing, and driving voters in Kansas, Ohio, California, Michigan, Vermont, Kentucky, Montana and nationwide. These contacts are causing - and will cause – voters nationwide to turn away from pro-birth politicians and churches. The Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision didn’t undo or end Roe v. Wade. It has mobilized women and men, young and old. And it has proven the failure of a pro-birth movement that seeks to force others to live in conformity with their theologies and ideologies of “life.”
Forget a six-to-three Supreme Court or Dobbs, the anti-abortion movement is on the road speeding toward a washed-out bridge to nowhere.
On Friday, July 7, President Joe Biden very publicly cited the case of a ten-year-old rape victim in Ohio who was forced to travel to Indiana to undergo an abortion.
On Wednesday, July 12, Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost posted a tweet in which he claimed his office had “not found any evidence of a 10-year-old rape victim in the state who, according to a report cited by President @Joe Biden, was six weeks pregnant and traveled to Indiana to receive an abortion.”
Shortly thereafter, Ohio Representative Jim Jordan retweeted Yost with the comment “Another lie. Anyone surprised.”
Within hours, Jordan and Yost were doing their best SNL Emily Litella imitations; “Never mind!” [We admit that last line shows our age, but “the Devil made us do it.”]
Only after President Biden decried the horror of forcing a 10-year-old Ohio rape victim to travel across state lines to Indiana to get an abortion because of her home state’s newly imposed restrictions, did the naysayers learn Gerson Fuentes, 28, had already pled guilty to two counts of rape and was sentenced to life in prison on July 5 – two days before President Biden’s comments and a full week before Yost’s denial and Jordan’s snark. The victim, who was nine-years-old at the time of the attack, only learned that she was pregnant after her tenth birthday.
Pro-birth and anti-abortion politicos were quick with their condemnations of the Indiana doctor. Their mea culpas and “I didn’t know” declarations were few and far.
When questioned by a CNN reported about deleting his “another lie” tweet, Jordan responded, “Well, because we learned this illegal alien did this heinous crime. Ahhh.. So we deleted it.” Questioned about whether or not he had apologized to the child victim, he self-defended “I never doubted the child. Ahhh. I was responding to the headline from ahhh from ahhh [sic] your profession, the news profession, which had a comment on twitter citing Joe Biden which is usually a smart thing to do.” When the CNN reporter pointed out that Jordan’s “Another lie” tweet came across as attacking the child, Jordan demurred, “No, not at all. I was just questioning Joe Biden.” He would not answer the question of about whether a ten-year-old child should be forced to carry a pregnancy to term if she was raped, saying it was up to state legislatures. The reporter noted Jordan “was trying to split hairs a bit,” when insisting that President Biden’s remarks on the case were untrue.
On Wednesday, July 20, Amanda Surawski described to a Travis County (Texas) court the medical emergency in which she lost the amniotic fluid necessary to maintain her pregnancy and how her doctor told her “miscarriage was inevitable.” Nonetheless, she was told that after Dobbs and under Texas law she would have to wait for miscarriage to occur naturally or until she was sick enough for doctors to feel (legally) safe inducing an abortion. Don’t go too far from the hospital, she was cautioned.
Samantha Casiano described how, over a period of four hours, she watched her newborn grasp for air, turn purple and go from warm to cold. Because of Texas’ antiabortion laws she was forced to give birth to her baby, born with anencephaly, a fetal anomaly that prevented the skull and brainstem from developing.
One of Ashley Brandt’s twins had a lethal fetal anomaly, acrania, and, the longer Ms. Brandt continued her pregnancy with both twins, the greater the risk to herself and the other fetus, which was developing properly. Because of Texas laws, she was forced to go to Colorado, where the procedure to save her and her viable baby’s life took minutes.
The more stories of maternal near-death struggles, babies who survived birth for mere minutes of unrelenting pain, and state-forced pregnancies that endanger or permanently injure mothers are heard, the more the United States will be politically divided anti-pro-birth and pro-legislatively-forced-birth.
On July 15, 1992, presidential candidate Bill Clinton told the Congressional Women’s Caucus meeting in New York, “We have to remind the American people once again that being pro-choice is very different from being pro-abortion,” echoing earlier statements that abortion should be “safe, legal and rare.”
For two thousand years, some theologians have sought to criminalize and eliminate abortion. They have failed.
We are not – will not, at least here – speak to the morality of women’s decisions.
We are simply stating facts.
On January 23, 2023, Forbes reported:
“The court’s ruling has remained unpopular one year later, with a CBS News/YouGov poll conducted in June finding 57% believe Roe’s overturning was ‘bad for the country’ because the ‘health and lives of women are more at risk’ (86% of those who said the ruling is bad agreed with that statement), a ‘constitutional right was taken away’ (81%) and ‘states are making abortion access harder’ (78%), with 50% of all respondents saying that abortion access has become even more restrictive than they expected.
“Still motivating Americans’ votes: Abortion was widely viewed as a motivator for voters in the 2022 midterms, and that trend is continuing, with Gallup finding a record-high 28% of voters said in May that they’ll ‘only vote for candidates for major offices who share their position on abortion,’ and CBS/YouGov finding a 46% plurality are more likely to vote for a candidate who backs protecting abortion access, versus 36% who would rather vote for an anti-abortion rights politician.
The pro-birth/anti-abortion movement has failed to change hearts and minds.
It’s time for the anti-abortion movement to face reality and work to make abortion “safe, legal and rare.”
This means establishing fearlessly honest and science-based sex education in every grade and high school in the nation.