Complacency and Abortion

     I received a tremendous grace in 1991. I was a "Sunday Catholic" who never really rejected the faith but never really embraced it either. In my pursuit of a residency training program in my specialty, foot surgery, I began visiting a doctor in central Pennsylvania. He was the residency director of a program at a small rural hospital here. And like so many others in late twentieth century America, he was a fallen away Catholic who had found faith, hope, and solace in an independent bible believing church.

     He was not afraid to witness to his born again Christianity. He challenged me and I very nearly lost my Catholic faith. I spent the summer of 1991 in agony, searching my soul and the Christian landscape for Christ’s church. In the midst of this spiritual turmoil, where I questioned everything I believed and thought to be true about Christianity, I had what that doctor would call a "born again" experience. After bible study one morning in his office in June of 1991, I walked out the back door in tears, convinced God was leading me to leave the faith of my youth, my friends and family. I made a heartfelt, sincere commitment to God: I told Him I would go wherever He wanted me to go, do whatever He wanted me to do, say whatever He wanted me to say, be whatever he wanted me to be.

     He heard that prayer and showered me with His Grace. By early fall I had met many good Catholics who built me up in my faith and led me to the books and resources I needed to find the truth. A study of the writings of the early Christians and the history of scripture and its proper interpretation led me to the conviction that God wanted me right where I had been, in His One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church.

     Along with this intense search for Christ’s true Church came the search for moral truth, especially in the area of marriage and sexuality. This lead to the realization that today’s Roman Catholic teachings on sexual morality were the same as those of the earliest Christian writers. For instance, all of Christianity unanimously taught that contraception was inherently immoral until 1930. It wasn’t until the Lambeth Conference of Anglican Bishops in 1930 that any Christian body taught that contraception could be morally licit, under certain circumstances. This came as a shock to my wife and I, who had been using the birth control pill since our marriage in August of 1990.

     Although I had managed to maintain a strong pro-life outlook even as a "Sunday Catholic," I had never bothered asking why the Church maintained its teaching that contraception was inherently sinful. My wife, who was Lutheran at the time, had been taught that a prudent Christian couple contracepted until they could "afford" children. As a financially strapped third year student when we married, I fully agreed. By the end of that summer of 1991 I was beginning to have serious doubts.

     In school I had access to many texts on physiology and pharmacology. It didn’t take long to discover that the oral "contraceptives" that we were using weren’t just contraceptive. Due to the progressively lower doses of hormones in birth control pills (to decrease the life-threatening side effects that had become all too apparent with the pill) release of an egg during the woman’s monthly cycle was known to occur in 2% to 10% of cycles with the most common birth control pills, and up to 20% to 50% of cycles with the mini pill, Norplant implants, and Depo-Provera shots.

     When this "breakthrough ovulation" occurs, so can fertilization. But an egg that is released and subsequently fertilized almost always dies, because it cannot implant and grow on the thin, shriveled lining of the uterus that is formed under the influence of these so-called contraceptive birth control pills. Proof of this can be found in an article in Archives of Family Medicine (one of the Journals of the AMA), Vol. 9 No. 2, February 2000, called "Postfertilization Effects of Oral Contraceptives and Their Relationship to Informed Consent."

     Imagine the horror of learning that our contraceptive could be killing our own newly formed babies! Despite confessing this grave sin to a priest who claimed that contraception was no longer sinful in the eyes of the church, my wife and I persevered in our newfound conviction that, at least from a pro-life position, contraception was terribly sinful. We purchased a book and video and taught ourselves Natural Family Planning.

     In December of 1991 we made a pilgrimage to the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, D.C. for the Feast of the Immaculate Conception. Because our knowledge of the practice of Natural Family Planning was so limited, we conceived our first born son that evening. Of course there are no accidental babies in God’s Divine Plan, a fact we would come to learn and appreciate later as our knowledge of the practice and morality of Natural Family Planning grew.

     My wife, Sue, was very responsive to my newfound knowledge of scripture, tradition, and Catholic morality, and was received into the Roman Catholic Church on the Easter Vigil of 1992.

     I graduated from school and started my residency under the direction of the "born again" Christian doctor in central Pennsylvania that summer. (This was no small miracle itself. I had taken to praying the rosary every day in the fall of 1991, asking for Mary’s intercession so that I could return to my home region in central Pennsylvania. I put all my eggs in one basket, so to speak. While my classmates applied to literally dozens of residencies in the hopes of getting accepted into just one, I only applied to that central Pennsylvania program. Several years later I learned that I wasn’t the residency director’s first pick either.)

     Michael Joseph was born in August 1992. We took NFP classes from a teaching couple in the area and successfully mastered it this time. As we embraced the Catholic faith more fully and came to a deeper understanding of marriage and sexuality, we decided to take courses to become Natural Family Planning instructors ourselves. Looking back, this may also have been an attempt to assuage our consciences and make reparation for our former contraceptive lifestyle. We began teaching several NFP courses per year. I was called upon to give a talk here and there on sexual morality and NFP to pre-Cana and confirmation classes.

     We felt good about ourselves and the work we were doing for God, almost feeling self-righteous for our good deeds. This is our pro-life work, we told ourselves. We may not have been standing in front of an abortion mill praying, but we were educating people about the abortive nature of chemical contraceptives, about the fact that the unitive and the procreative aspects of the marital act cannot be separated. We were showing God’s people His will for limiting and spacing children, and what constitutes a grave moral reason for having recourse to NFP. We were striking at the root of the problem of abortion. As the Supreme Court admitted in Planned Parenthood vs. Casey, "in some critical respects abortion is of the same character as the decision to use contraceptives.... people have organized intimate relationships....in reliance on the availability of abortion in the event that contraception should fail." (Contraceptives will always fail. God is Life. He is the Creator. We are made in the image and likeness of God. In marriage we are co-creators with God. Fertility, that which leads to life, cannot be suppressed or eliminated any more than God, Who is Life, can be suppressed or eliminated.)

     I prided myself that I was doing important work for God, pro-life work. But my commitment to this really was no more than a couple NFP classes and talks each year. I really had forgotten those innocent babies who should never be forgotten.

     I had become complacent.

     I did not realize it until 1997. I had returned to the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception on October 13, 1997, to attend the culmination of an international week of prayer and fasting to end abortion, under the intercession of the Blessed Virgin Mary, on the eightieth anniversary of the miracle at Fatima. I sat there during the mass and listening to the various speakers, and I realized I had become complacent. I thought about those intervening years since I had last sat in that beautiful Basilica, and I cried. I thought of the evening our first born son was conceived in that city, and the magnificent gift of our three children, and the one we lost to miscarriage, and I cried. I thought of that commitment I made to God in June of 1991, seemingly so long before, and I cried. I listened to them speak of partial birth abortion, euthanasia, the newest, latest assaults on the innocent and defenseless, and I cried. I thought of all the many blessings my God had bestowed on me in my short life, and the biblical admonition that to those to whom much is given, much will be expected. I asked God to forgive me for my complacency.

     Then I made a new commitment that night, similar to that one I made to God so many years ago. I prayed to the Blessed Virgin Mary, Mother of my Lord and God, Jesus Christ. I promised that with her intercession I would renew my efforts to end this evil of abortion. I told her I would go wherever she wants me to go, do whatever she wants me to do, say whatever she wants me to say, be whatever she wants me to me. Through her intercession, by the Grace of the passion, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, I would no longer be a complacent Catholic.

     Daily, I need to recall my committment to this battle. The routine of everyday life, the demands of work, the bills we’re never quite able to keep up with, the childrens’ colds and homeschooling and dirty diapers, all these little distractions can cause us to forget, if only for a time, God’s forgotten ones. However, we cannot let ourselves slip into complacency. Along with our daily decision to follow Jesus must come our daily decision to pick up the Cross. Part of the Cross we bear is the knowledge of what is happening to God’s forgotten ones each minute of each day.

     Abortion continues because of complacency, but God’s forgotten ones don’t have the luxury of being complacent. Neither do we. Today our complacency threatens the lives of those we do not know. Tomorrow it may threaten our own life or that of our loved ones. Most importantly, our embrace of the Cross today, and the pro-life battle that is part of it, is not optional, if we hope to attain Eternal Life.