I grew up Roman Catholic.  I didn’t have any desire to have a career, other than wife and mother.  I wanted at least a dozen children.  I married at twenty-one and cried each month after my wedding when I wasn’t pregnant. Six months after marriage I happily conceived my first child.  Unfortunately, I wasn’t physically built for giving birth, so after sixteen hours they did a Caesarian surgery.  I nursed my first baby and didn’t get pregnant again until a year later.  But seven months after my second child I was pregnant with my third.  After having my third by Caesarean, I was cautioned that having too many C sections close together could be dangerous, so we tried using the rhythm method of birth control, the only one allowed by the Catholic religion. Sadly, I wasn’t regular enough for this to work and nine months later I was pregnant once more.  When this baby was delivered, I had many adhesions from the previous pregnancies and the doctor told me that the possibility that I would die if I had another pregnancy in the next two or three years was extremely high.

I went to the pastor of our church for advice. His response was that many children had good step-mothers.

I obviously was considered dispensable.  I decided that I wasn’t going to stay in a religion that considered unfertilized eggs more important than a human being who was mother to four children under the age of five.  Since I equated the Catholic Religion with God, I decided I didn’t like God much either. Not liking God isn’t very comfortable, since God might reciprocate, so I put God into my mental file under “Probably Not.”

For several years I worked in the Civil Rights movement and went back to study Psychology, figuring that since we were our own, we needed to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps. As my children got older and I realized how thin humanity’s layer of civilization was, I began to explore different religions, both Christian and others.  None of the religions seem to have the life-giving power I read about in the Scriptures, but some friends of ours gave up a very affluent life style to work with Campus Crusade for Christ, an organization focused on helping people find a personal relationship with Jesus, not any particular religion. When as an agnostic they challenged me to say a prayer this way, “Jesus, IF, you are who you claimed to be, the Love of God fleshed out for us, please be my Savior and Lord.  That seemed like a win/win, but I didn’t really expect anything to change. Just a few minutes later, I was overwhelmed by an experience of the unconditional Love of God for me, even when I was rejecting Him.  That was the beginning of a spiritual journey with Jesus that is still growing at eighty-six years of age.  

I went back to the Catholic church, though still using birth control.  Four years later, in spite of birth control, I became pregnant with my fifth child. I was somewhat afraid, but because of the many ways God now was visible in my life, I trusted God.

When having my fifth Caesarian, I was awake with a spinal injection and there were eighteen medical students watching this surgery.  They put a metal bar holding a green sheet in front of my face, so I couldn’t see the actual surgery, but I saw them lift my baby boy safely out. But suddenly my usually very calm doctor was shouting instructions for his assistants, and they were running back and forth. One knocked over the glass IV bottle and it shattered making crunching noises as nurses walked on it. Someone knocked the metal bar over my nose just after I saw my doctor’s gloved hands covered in blood.  I began to feel weaker and weaker, as if life was going out of me. 

Instead of panicking, I felt at peace. Maybe God was going to send a better mother for my children.  I knew I would be with God and trusted God to be with my husband and family.  (Though I did have a momentary disappointment that my dying was sort of a Three Stooges act.)

Obviously, I didn’t die. They were able to stop the bleeding and remove the now torn uterus.

The point of this is that without my faith in God there is no way I could have stayed functional through the pregnancy or peaceful when I thought I was dying. I don’t personally advocate abortion and did not choose it. And the idea of using abortion as birth control is repugnant to me.

But we cannot expect children (some ten-year olds can now get pregnant) or women without faith to die when it isn’t necessary.  Even at thirty-three, without faith I could not have dealt with the fear of death, never-the-less accept it.

The Catholic Church back then taught that life not only began when sperm and egg connected, but that if a fetus died without baptism it would go to some strange separate place called limbo, not to heaven with it’s mom and dad and family.

So, when this adorable innocent little baby needed surgery at two weeks old and the night in the hospital before the operation, they discovered that he had a heart defect, I was more shaken than when I myself was possibly dying. There were tense consultations between pediatrician, heart doctor, and the surgeon, but it was decided that he needed the other surgery and the heart seemed strong enough to survive it.  That night I apologized to God as I baptized my son myself. “God I know you love this child even more than I do and would not send it somewhere beside heaven, but you allowed me to grow up in a religion that taught that you would, so please forgive me for the insult of baptizing this child for fear you would reject it on a technicality. I now know your wonderful unconditional love and see how illogical that fear is, but I need the assurance that my child will be with you and with those who love him if he dies.

My baby did not die and when he was four his heart finally healed without surgery.

There is no agreement on when a fetus is officially a person, but many, many mothers have had heartbreaking miscarriages at all stages of pregnancy and adding shame and punishment to that is criminal in itself.

As Christians our call isn’t to punish, kill, or jail people. Our challenge is to witness to a faith that grows and overcomes fear and loneliness and despair. And to share the Love of God that will give all his children the courage, wisdom, and help they need even when they make life changing mistakes.