Pro-Life

Her Restless Heart Finds Healing At Last

March 10, 2021By

Growing up in a small town, Sue Ellen Browder longedto one day find success in a big bustling city. So landing in Hollywood as an alreadyaccomplished writer may have seemed like a dream come true.

As she details in the final chapters of her memoir Subverted:How I Helped the Sexual Revolution Hijack the Women’s Movement, Hollywood,however, was just another alluring mirage that would give way to stark reality.

Despite Browder’s prolific and principled husband pouring his heart into one screenplay after another, he faced a steady stream of rejection.

When Browder, renowned for her articles in Cosmopolitan and other publications, appearedon the highly-rated Oprah show, she is left deflated by the experience.  “Fame, like glamour, had become for me justanother sick illusion.”

The hardships piled up. Unexpected health issues, never-endingfinancial worries, and rising marital tension. Depressed and at times, evensuicidal, Browder felt like there was nothing that could ease her angst.

Her newly emptied nest magnified her despair. When her daughter returned to college one semester, she had a breakdown. Unloading the dishwasher she deliberately smashed every plate on the tile floor.  Later, she realized this outburst was fueled “at least in part from my unresolved grief over the abortion” decades before.

Miraculously, in the midst of this dark emotionalchaos, a light appeared.

Her husband began to read again and was captivated by St. Augustine’s Confessions. Browder saw a newfound sense hope growing in him that she envied.

In an effort to find greater peace and beauty in life,the couple resettled in a home nestled in the magnificent Redwood forest. Herethey would find what they were looking for and more. Their desire to know“God’s reality,” an unchanging truth, led them to the Catholic faith.

Just moments into their first meeting with a priest, Browder’s husband blurted out that they had an abortion. The priest simply nodded, but Browder herself was shocked.

“I had no idea Walter considered the abortion ‘ours.’ Ithad never occurred to me that all these years he had been silently grievingright along with me.” Theirs, like that of many couples, had been a hushedmourning, with a profound grief simmering under the surface.

As part of her journey into the Catholic Church, Browder received the Sacrament of Reconciliation in which sins are forgiven. She thought she would finally find healing. But even after her first confession she suffered in silence, unable to let go of self-blame.  “I feared if I ever started talking about the abortion, I would never stop crying.”

Her post-abortion trauma led her back to theconfessional. She began to trust in God’s endless mercy. “After a quartercentury of unspoken grief over the abortion, I at last begin to be healed. TheChurch, in her all-forgiving love, is so beautiful that I feel as if I’m livinginside a two-thousand-year-old poem.”

It is from this long-sought place of serenity that Browdercan look back at her life’s journey and at the women’s movement she oncerevered to see where she and we have gone wrong.

“Love for God and others, including love for thelittle person in the womb, is what gives meaning to life, even in the midst ofpain and suffering.  This is the unseendimension of women’s lives that the Mere Fifty-Seven overlooked…when theycreated a pro-abortion political agenda….”

Brower’s memoir is a lesson to us all, generouslyoffered by way of her own pain and redemption, skillfully crafted by her talentas a writer.  We would be wise to keep itwithin reach and explore its pages from time to time.

Quotable Quotes

“As strong, independent women, we need to be speakingout loudly and clearly about the truth that ‘success’ in life isn’t just aboutcareers, sex, power, and money.  Allthese trappings are nothing without love.” (p.148)

“If every Christian in America had stood firmly withthe smallest, weakest, and poorest in our society-that is, if each and everyChristian had stood firmly with the innocent preborn child nailed to thecross-we would have far fewer abortions than we do in the United States and theworld today.” (p. 180)

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Abortion

The Difference a Law Can Make

March 4, 2021By

A happily married woman who delights in her twochildren may not seem like someone who would get an abortion.

Yet, Sue Ellen Browder did.  In her book Subverted: How I Helped theSexual Revolution Hijack the Women’s Movement, she reveals the mindset thatled her to a decision she would later regret.

It’s a mindset that, decades later, still lures womento abort. At its core is the universal emotion of fear.

Browder feared that she and her husband, struggling writers working temp jobs to keep the lights on, could not afford another child. The 1970’s Cosmo culture in which she was steeped validated that fear and gave her “permission” to act on it. “In my mind, abortion was an integral part of the women’s movement, a right as fundamental as equal pay for equal work,” she writes. As “watered-down Christians,” she says her husband even tried to find justification for abortion in the Bible.

But Browder admits that she would never have considered abortion were it not legal in 1974. “Looking up some sleazy criminal abortionist in a back alley would be too hideous a prospect for words.” An important admission that we need to bear in mind today as we seek to change laws to protect life.

Getting a legal abortion in the “bright, clean hospital” where she had already given birth, however, gave it an air of legitimacy, as though it were just like any other medical procedure. “I didn’t think of myself as killing a child. I thought of myself as solving a problem.”

The abortion was excruciatingly painful, both physicallyand emotionally. In an act of self-preservation, Browder blocked much of thedetails from her mind, rendering the memory a blur.

Afterward, she numbly returned to work. “I have justsnuffed out a tiny life over my lunch hour. I have betrayed the bond of love that holds the universe together. Andno one I work with seems any the wiser.”

To prevent any possible feelings from surfacing, Browderburied herself in distractions. She blamed the persistent angst and depression shefelt on the couple’s continually volatile finances.  Her husband struggled emotionally as well, andthey chose to stifle their pain by never speaking of the abortion.

One day, however, Browder found herself offering a gestureof atonement. She spontaneously purchased a brand new wooden crib and mattressand donated it to a pro-life center for “some struggling mother who, despiteher poverty, had chosen to keep her baby and to reach out humbly to others forhelp.” Something she wished she had done.

Browder’s thinking shifted and she questioned the fauxfeminism that portrayed abortion as the great liberator. She recognized thatshe herself was deceived by the very propaganda she helped disseminate as awriter for Cosmopolitan.

Her entry into the Episcopal Church, coinciding with herwork on a book about human interactions, resulted in a new understanding of personhood.She realized an interconnectedness between all humans, especially mother andchild.

It gradually became clear to Browder that the women’smovement embodied by Betty Friedan and the National Organization for Women wasrooted in flawed thinking that “falsely isolates a woman from God, from a truerelationship of love with a man, and even from the dance of life in her ownbody.”

Browder had succumbed to fear in getting her abortion, but she would no longer succumb to the lies that pitted women against their children.

Her journey was taking a new turn, one that would leadher to a surprising place.

(Please join us in reading Chapter 13-18 and theEpilogue for next week.)

Quotable quotes:

“It’s not only a tiny little life who dies on thisgurney. Part of my heart dies along with him.” (p. 105)

“Men, stripped of the maturity than comes withresponsible fatherhood, were becoming self-absorbed Peter Pans who couldn’tgrow up.” (p. 122)

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