August 27th, 2015 - Mary Chuey Bishop
- donaldewquist
- 12 minutes ago
- 5 min read
I sit in the same corner I did a decade ago. This time the statue of St. Mary (now broken) observes me, which back then watched over my parents (now deceased) in the home of my childhood (now torn down). My pair of sweet puppies is still beside me, and I still call them puppies despite their gray muzzles and old-lady snoring.
At 40+ I took the damp wool August heat better than I do at 50+, yet I was far more discomfited. Something moved inside me then as I scrolled Facebook, twisting like a tapeworm, eating away the truths I’d swallowed since birth. It writhed as it fed upon my certainties; with my foundation cracking beneath me, I feared plunging into an abyss.
I reflected that I was a product of accident and dedication, a strange potion of unplanned and to-die-for. My parents had already had four children, all boys, and thought my mother was too old to conceive. Three years before Roe v. Wade, she discovered her pregnancy by chance after blood tests following a car accident, and was immediately advised by doctors and friends to cross state lines and have an abortion. She was “old,” and all the boys had been delivered by C-section to avoid the stress of labor on her brain, which had housed an inoperable aneurysm for more than ten years. Each birth put her life at greater-than-normal risk, and one of her students had exposed her to rubella, giving the fetus a 33% chance of being born healthy. Did she want to die and leave her husband a widower, having to raise four kids himself? But my parents were devout Catholics and fiercely pro-life, and my mother carried me to term. Against the odds, we both made it through the pregnancy in good health.
With such an oft repeated origin story, I eagerly swallowed the slogans of the pro-life movement from a young age. Every Mother’s Day I sold roses outside Mass to raise money to help single pregnant women keep their babies, and I made phone calls and held posters to persuade passersby to vote for pro-life candidates. I did my junior high school speech on outlawing abortion, and watched snippets of the March for Life with my mom on television. She was never more pleased with me than when we worked side by side stuffing political envelopes, and I desperately craved that acceptance from a usually frigid mother. It felt so warm, so safe, to stand together for what we thought was unconditionally right.
By 2015 I’d had five children of my own, and spoke out against abortion on social media and in person with friends. But internally, my heart tossed about like a die in the Pop-O-Matic Trouble board.
That year, when I sat in this same corner and posted a video from pro-life darling Abby Johnson, an infamous ex-abortion clinic manager whose claims about the horrors of the industry have been widely challenged, my sister-in-law (now ex-) Sasha responded. Sasha* had become a dear friend, even though she was quite liberal and I, solely based on the abortion issue, saw myself as conservative. Sasha was younger than I, and beautiful and smart, with a wicked wit. I knew it was dangerous for her to get pregnant, and that she was pro-choice, so we avoided the topic when we were together. But this time she chose to engage.
She didn’t say I was wrong, or cruel, or misguided and naive. She politely pointed out that, since the video had been released, it had been proven false by reliable sources. She said she knew I was intelligent and cared about the truth, and invited me to look it up and see for myself, to save my own credibility. Most importantly, she said, “I love you” rather than unfriend me. She had shown her love before, and I knew that whether I doubled down or changed my mind, it wouldn’t change her feelings. She gave me the dual gift of acceptance and gentle challenge.
I looked up the video. She was right—the claims had been proven exaggerated or false. I felt something chip off inside me, a brittle bone shard that floated about, leaving lacerations in its wake. How much of what I’d ingested was exaggerated, or just a lie? I felt mountainous Catholic guilt for wondering, but I also felt poison running through me.
That August, a friend posted, “Women are not empowered by abortion; they and our children are abandoned because of it.” As I threw a Like on, I thought of the time in college when I spent the night sobbing on the floor in a fetal position, begging God not to let me be pregnant because it would mean dropping out of school and being a mother even though I’d been fired from every babysitting job I’d ever had (locked out, fell asleep with baby crying, locked out).
As I threw another Like on a post by “Defund Planned Parenthood,” I thought about the driver who had crashed into another car in front of me years earlier as I protested outside the local clinic (the only time I ever did). I ran over to help and found the young woman sobbing, desperately checking on an adorable child in a car seat behind her. When I asked if they were OK, her eyes hardened. “You should not be out here with those signs,” she said. “It’s distracting. Leave me alone.” The layers in her voice, the pain in her eyes, spoke of more than distraction. I had hurt her. In this corner, I made myself imagine her potential lives, the possible causes of that pain. I discovered that I loved her, just as much as I loved the darling girl in the back seat.
A decade after Sasha’s quiet care and the young driver’s haunting eyes, the seeds of transformation they planted in my heart have grown long and lush. The process was neither quick nor painless, full of the abyss I’d feared and desperate soul-searching in the dark, followed by the weight of my actions through all of my young life. But 2025 me (now liberal) sits under the image of the ultimate woman who was given a choice, and the only writhing in my stomach is for all the rights being lost in our country today. I barely recognize 2015 me, and much of the time I’m ashamed of her. But I’m trying to learn to love her as Sasha did, so I can help sow more seeds.
*name changed for privacy
