Bishop Slattery Decries Pain of Women Who ‘Lost Part of their Soul’ to Abortion

Bishop Slattery Decries Pain of Women Who ‘Lost Part of their Soul’ to Abortion

By Kathleen Gilbert

April 26, 2010 (LifeSiteNews.com) – In a stirring homily delivered in the magnificent National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington D.C. this Sunday, Bishop Edward Slattery of Tulsa, Oklahoma, called attention to the pain of countless post-abortive women who now grieve the loss of their child – pain that is largely ignored or silenced by the pro-abortion lobby and media.

(Read the complete homily here)

Slattery was celebrating a pontifical high Mass in honor of the anniversary of the pontificate of Pope Benedict XVI, in the first traditional Latin Mass to be celebrated at the high altar at the Shrine in more than 40 years.

“It is the sufferings of our people that defines the culture of our modern secular age,” said Slattery.

He then called attention to various forms of distinctly modern suffering, including “women who have been deceived into believing that abortion was a simple medical procedure and thus have lost part of their soul to the greed of the abortionist.”

Although the bitter stories of post-abortive women often never see the light of day, hundreds of grieving women have shared their testimonies through the advocacy group Silent No More Awareness. Among them are several stories describing exactly what Slattery spoke of: the lingering anguish of women who, unwilling to face the reality of abortion until it was too late, found themselves forced by clinic staff to go through with a procedure that ends up shattering their lives with guilt.

Rebecca of Florida describes the hellish experience of her third abortion after her parents refused to sign the papers to give the child up for adoption. (Click here to watch video of Rebecca’s testimony.)

“When I walked into the door that day, I was crying even when I walked in the door, I didn’t want to be there,” says Rebecca. “All they wanted was my money.” After the procedure began, she relates, she finally met the gaze of the nurse: “She looked down, and then she looked up at me and she smiled and she said, ‘Oh look, twins.’

“And I just remember screaming, ‘Oh my God, what have I done,’ and I screamed, ‘Stop, stop, please stop,’ and then the abortionist started screaming at me to lay down because I was trying to get up off of the table. … They had to come and hold me down and finish the procedure.

“I remember walking out of there that day like a zombie and I just wanted to die. And I did try to commit suicide twice within the next three months. “

For Luz of Florida, her “living hell” started the moment she woke up from the anaesthetic of her abortion. “I felt my life was ruined, and I thought of suicide so I could join my baby in the afterlife,” she wrote. “On the way home from the clinic I thought about throwing myself out of the car on the expressway.”

Luz said she spent years attempting suicide, suffering flashbacks, withdrawing into deep depression, and resenting her husband and her living children for her abortion.

However, like several other women, Luz said she began to learn how to forgive herself, and the others involved, only after reconciling to God through a Rachel’s Vineyard retreat and other forms of spiritual healing.

“I came to understand that God allowed his son, Jesus Christ, to die on the cross for the forgiveness of my sins,” she said. “That included the horrible sin of my abortion.

In his homily Sunday, Slattery took up the theme of suffering to point out that such pain is “transformed by [Christ’s] presence.”

Because of Christ, said Slattery, suffering “no longer has the power to alienate or isolate us. Neither can it dehumanize us nor destroy us. Suffering, however long and terrible it may be, has only the power to reveal Christ among us, and He is the mercy and the forgiveness of God.”

(Click here to read Bishop Slattery’s full homily.)