"The attackers obviously did not hold religion in high regard, so I will not blame catholicism for their sins...."
The Catholic church holds women in low esteem and might have affected the attitude of the attackers. You are not doing the next victim any favours by forgiving those who trespass against you.
Before Roe v. Wade ruling, tragedy wasn't only for those who died
TIVERTON, R.I. Each year at this time, many Americans look back to Jan. 22, 1973 when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on the now infamous Roe v. Wade case, thereby legalizing abortion is all 50 states, where previously only half that number allowed pregnancy terminations under state laws. Since that date, the abortion debate has raged on, and politics, religion and human interaction have never been the same.
Pro choice advocates, of which I am proud to be one, now take the time to memorialize the many heroes and heroines of their long battle to allow women control over their own fertility. We speak of those who marched and picketed, who lobbied legislatures and toiled legally and illegally in medical settings over the years, and we remember too those women who died at the hands of so-called "back alley butchers" who prevailed in the era when our mothers and grandmothers sought abortions and found them by whatever means possible.
But in remembering those who died, we too often neglect an equally tragic part of the movement's history: the women who lived. In going on, some spent their lives facing the horrible memories of unstoppable hemorrhages draining strength from their bodies in the dark of night, in lonely dorm rooms, or in the back seats of cars driven by friends who accompanied them on their sub rosa nightmares before Roe.
Others endured the sadness of future infertility, forever maimed by opportunists who evacuated their wombs -- unskilled, uncaring and unspeakable. Still others live with the recurring horror of their own attempts to abort with coat hangers, strange potions, vacuum cleaner hoses, gin-induced stupors, whatever old wives' tales offered as a remedy for a forbidden pregnancy for which society would condemn them forever.
Such recalled nightmares of a time when an unmarried woman's pregnancy meant certain shame, ostracism and doom do not belong to Americans alone. Recently, in Ireland, a memorial was dedicated to other women, thousands of them, forced into slavery by no less than the authorities of the Roman Catholic Church because they were either "sexually active" or thought to be at risk of engaging in sexual activity. These women were sent to the Magdalen Laundries to spend a life of silence, except for prayers of self-hatred and pleas for God's mercy, working unpaid in the convent laundries of the Magdalen nuns.
If they arrived at these laundries throughout Ireland already pregnant, they were immediately separated from their children following delivery, and the offspring were shipped to waiting families in the USA. Boston was a favorite export point in this commerce of humanity, since, in that city, where even today the IRA is revered in some quarters, Irish Americans were willing to accept the bishop's terms for such adoptions. Those terms dictated that the adoptive mother must not work outside the home, and that the adopted child must be raised and educated in the Catholic faith.
This tale, however medieval, of the Magdalen "penitents," as the mothers were called, was still being woven as recently as the 1960's. A lawsuit by some surviving women seeking compensation from church authorities and cooperating government officials, is still pending in Irish courts as you read these words.
The Magdalen nuns saw their original mission as the salvation of prostitutes. In time, however, that definition was expanded to include young women guilty only of loving a man of their choice before they were married. This forced slavery, degradation and punishment was being ordered by the same Irish bishops and Roman hierarchy content to overlook the sexual abuse of minors, sexual assault on communicants, and affairs sometimes resulting in the fathering of children by priests and others in church ranks, which the Irish courts continue to deal with to this day.
In the United States as in Ireland, historically and currently, unmarried women still bear the bulk of society's and the law's disdain for pregnancies resulting from consensual sex. Men who make unmarried women pregnant are still "studs" and the women carrying their children are still "tramps" worldwide. One Magdalen survivor notes that even today, in Ireland, a woman alone is ineligible for public housing in her own right. She must be either married, living with a man, or the mother of a child for the government to build a roof over her head.
Still, planeloads of pregnant women on daily charters leave Ireland, where abortion is unavailable, for the clinics of Britain where they can make the choice to terminate a pregnancy threatening their life, their dignity, their very survival and ability to thrive. In America too, more than a quarter century since Roe, many poor women, uninsured working women, and too many young women are also still robbed of the reproductive choices they deserve.
Lest we approach the twenty-second day of January with any sense of triumph regarding how far we have come, the long shadow of the Magdalens, dozens of whom were buried in mass graves when their childbirth or conditions of enslavement gone awry robbed them of life, reaches across the sea to remind us of how far we still must travel.
And as the American Conference of Catholic Bishops launches its latest campaign to target pro-choice lawmakers, the specter of that institution's long history of sexual oppression of women against a backdrop of sexual permissiveness and perversion in its own ranks still pulsates as a terrifying reality to the faithful in their pews.
This year, on the anniversary of Roe, therefore, those still embracing the dream of reproductive freedom must remember the women who lived on and still live with their own personal hells, victims of a perverse and hypocritical morality which still echoes in Rome, and in the halls of America's Congress.
The simple mass grave marker of the now dead Magdalens, on which the church forced to erect it etched no religious symbol, reminds us all that the cause of reproductive rights, like liberty itself , requires constant vigilance.
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Mary Ann Sorrentino is a syndicated columnist. She was executive director of Planned Parenthood of Rhode Island from 1977 to 1987, and because of that work was declared excommunicated from the Roman Catholic Church in 1985. |
