{"id":7321,"date":"2004-05-07T15:16:06","date_gmt":"2004-05-07T15:16:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2004\/05\/wisdom_1.html"},"modified":"2004-05-07T15:16:06","modified_gmt":"2004-05-07T15:16:06","slug":"wisdom_1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2004\/05\/wisdom_1.html","title":{"rendered":"Wisdom"},"content":{"rendered":"

As usual, from After Abortion<\/a><\/p>\n

(scroll down a bit)<\/p>\n

I never was publicly pro-choice, but I sure did keep my mouth shut out of fear if the topic ever came up. I never cared if a politician I voted for supported abortion. I tacitly supported abortion because I thought, “How could I ever come out against it, having had one? I\u2019ll be roasted alive.\u201d And by both sides I might add, as we saw at the march on April 25.<\/p>\n

And that, my friends, is how I think so many Catholics For Choice and other people who say, as I once did, that they\u2019re religious manage it. A lot of us are PA, and cannot face it. There is no unified, serious, consistent outcry or effort against abortion and for women and children in the womb from the lay members of the Catholic Church, because it is cognitive dissonance to the max. We rationalized our choice so we wouldn\u2019t get hammered in the short run. I can say there are “a lot” of us because I personally know so many Catholic women and men who have said this. <\/p>\n

[For those who might argue they can be both, it really is right there in our Catholic Catechism, which I’ve referenced here before (pages 606-608, sections # 2270-2275, and # 2319, 2322-2323).]<\/p>\n

We have the Kennedys (starting with JFK, Sr.), Daschles and Dodds of the nation to thank for some of this. Such pioneers.<\/p>\n

Secondly, the Catholic Church clergy (perhaps others too) really haven\u2019t made it 100% possible or easy for we who do regret to seek help at a Rachel\u2019s Vineyard or similar resource. Connecticut has about 384,000 self-identified Catholic families. If there\u2019s one adult woman in every family, the abortion facts from Allan Guttmacher Institute mean that there could be as many as 153,000 post-abortive women in these families (40% of all women aged 20 and up have had abortions, AGI said last year).<\/p>\n

And not all of us are like Kate Michelman, who I believe calls herself a Catholic still. Norma McCorvey –the former \u201cJane Roe\u201d of Roe v. Wade, now a devout Catholic– said she was terrified of going into a church at one time, afraid that the people there and God Himself would be so angry at her that the people would condemn her openly and God would cause the church walls and roof to collapse on her in punishment, killing everyone with her.<\/p>\n

Many women who have aborted say they have this same fear of going back to church… We may want to stand up against abortion secretly, but are terrified of being punished as “hypocrites” by both sides, but especially by those who are pro-life.<\/p>\n

I just received an e-mail from a self-identified “practicing Catholic, pro-life, pro-family, pro-marriage” reader of one of my columns who lambasted people like the post-abortive man in the column and me as being “still the most utterly selfish, immature and cowardly people I have ever encountered,” “anti-marriage and anti-family,” adding that our annulments were a farce dispensed by \u201cliberal dioceses\u201d and that we\u2019ve “ruined enough people’s lives already” so we should not ever have relationships again and that all we\u2019ve done by going on a Rachel\u2019s Vineyard retreat is find ourselves “a cryfest and a sympathetic, liberal ear.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As usual, from After Abortion (scroll down a bit) I never was publicly pro-choice, but I sure did keep my mouth shut out of fear if the topic ever came up. I never cared if a politician I voted for supported abortion. I tacitly supported abortion because I thought, “How could I ever come out…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7321","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nWisdom - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2004\/05\/wisdom_1.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Wisdom - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"As usual, from After Abortion (scroll down a bit) I never was publicly pro-choice, but I sure did keep my mouth shut out of fear if the topic ever came up. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7321","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7321"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7321\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7321"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7321"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7321"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}