The Difference a Law Can Make

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)