Her Restless Heart Finds Healing At Last

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)