Oprah Winfrey gave a big boost to the “abortion is wonderful” cause last month when she included in her O magazine a first-person story by the woman who began the #ShoutYourAbortion movement.
The pro-life media picked up on Oprah’s endorsement of child killing, so the hashtag is trending again. And as so often happens on Twitter, pro-lifers have taken over the feed. But that doesn’t change that one of the most influential people in our nation, one whose name has been floated as a future presidential candidate, is endorsing a procedure that is decimating the African-American community, has left the U.S. at a child deficit, and killed 60 million unborn children.
What irks me the most is that thousands of courageous women who speak publicly about their abortions, and the lifetime of regret that has followed, are, as usual, being left out of the conversation.
In 2002, a very brave Georgette Forney, president of Anglicans for Life, attended the March for Life in D.C. with a small, homemade sign that said “I regret choosing my abortion.” She had no idea how she would be accepted by the hundreds of thousands of pro-lifers on Constitution Avenue but, as she told the Washington Post in 2013, “I was shocked how many other people at the march came up next to me and said, ‘Me, too.'”
Later that year, Georgette and I founded the Silent No More Awareness Campaign, a mobilization of women and men who have lost children to abortion and are willing to say publicly that they had made the wrong choice. We had our first gathering at the March for Life in 2003 and the testimonies of these courageous women and men have become an integral part of not only the D.C. march but at pro-life events across the country and in Canada. This year, I spoke about the campaign at the March for Life in Rome.
Our campaign signs have become quite recognizable. Women hold signs that say “I Regret My Abortion,” and for men, we have signs that say “I Regret Lost Fatherhood.” Both also include the words “Ask Me Why.” Lots of people ask.
Each year in D.C., dozens of women stand on a small stage outside the Supreme Court and confess, again, the intimate details of worst thing they have ever done, and the consequences that followed. Thousands of people are listening and sometimes there are TV cameras recording their words. Imagine the moxie that takes! They do it for two reasons: To reach women before they make the choice they can never take back, and to invite mothers and fathers of aborted children to end their suffering in silence and find healing.
This is not what the abortion cartel and its supporters in government, the media, and Hollywood want people to hear. They want to keep pushing the lie that abortion is good for women, good for the economy, even good for the crime rate.
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Oprah had another opportunity to tell the truth about abortion, but she passed it up. Several years ago, she did a two-hour interview with Steven Tyler of the rock band Aerosmith. He wrote the band autobiography Walk This Way about the abortion of his son at five months: “It was a big crisis. It’s a major thing when you’re growing something with a woman, but they convinced us that it would never work out and would ruin our lives. … You go to the doctor and they put the needle in her belly and they squeeze the stuff in and you watch. And it comes out dead. I was pretty devastated. In my mind, I’m going, Jesus, what have I done?”
Oprah didn’t bring it up.
Tyler also wrote disparagingly about the teenage mother of this child, who was both his legal ward and his fiancee when he coerced her into an abortion. Julia Holcomb, who left the chaos of Tyler’s world and became a devout Catholic and mother of seven, was forced to tell her own family, and the world, about her abortion.
Julia speaks in a very soft voice but her words deserve to be heard: “I became very quiet and withdrawn after the abortion,” she wrote in a 2011 story published by LifeSite News. “I was grieving the loss of my baby and I could never look at Steven again without remembering what he had done to our son and me. I had just lived through a horrific fire that nearly claimed my life, but the abortion made me feel like part of me died with my baby.”
Julia’s story, and the stories of thousands of women who have vowed to be Silent No More, are not what #ShoutYourAbortion is all about. But they are the truth, whether Oprah Winfrey wants to talk about it or not.
LifeNews.com Note: Janet Morana is the executive director of Priests for Life and the co-founder of the Silent No More Awareness campaign helping women who have been hurt by abortions to speak out.
