c. 1996 Religion News Service

(Frederica Mathewes-Green is a member of the Eastern Orthodox Church. She is the author of the recent book”Real Choices”and a frequent contributor to Christianity Today and other publications.)

(RNS)-Each year, the end of January marks a sober anniversary: the Supreme Court decision known as Roe vs. Wade.

But the year just past included some good news for the anti-abortion movement:

-The religious conversion of Norma McCorvey, the”Roe”of the decision’s title, and her defection to the anti-abortion cause.

-Congress’ approval of a law forbidding a particularly gruesome form of late-term abortion.

-A lengthy cover story in the Atlantic Monthly, presenting a strategy for rolling back abortion’s high numbers (which remain at about 1.5 million per year).

-The growing willingness of abortion moderates in the Republican party to part company with the abortion-as-liberation crowd, decrying the damage the procedure does to our social fabric.

Ironically, this last hopeful bud is sprouting from debates about whether the party platform should include a call for a human life amendment. It seems that when the issue of abortion legality is separated from that of abortion desirability, a whole new flock of anti-abortion partisans bursts forth.

There is little likelihood abortion will become illegal in the near future. Even the law mentioned above must overcome a presidential veto and, if enforced, would permit equally deadly methods to be substituted. Abortion businesses will continue to open in our shopping centers and advertise in our Yellow Pages for the foreseeable future.

But the very security of abortion’s legal status is allowing room for soul-searching and second thoughts that would have seemed too risky before. Suppressed voices are speaking out: women who had abortions-and who may still be pro-choice-but who found in the aftermath of loss a searing, unexpected grief. Before, it would have been traitorous to say this. Now, hearts are breaking open and spilling out their pain.

Many of these women, of course, become anti-abortion; the National Women’s Coalition for Life includes a quarter-million post-abortion women in their cause.

But some try to work out a middle path.

One example is Naomi Wolf, who wrote an essay in a recent issue of The New Republic. She began with examples of women’s regret over the violence of abortion and called on fellow abortion-rights advocates to acknowledge that abortion kills.

How then can abortion be permitted? Because it can be handled in the context of”sin and repentance.”Wolf suggested that we recognize abortion as a”terrible social evil”but one permissible if chosen after careful deliberation, with plans to atone (“mending”).

This is a good try, but it ultimately stumbles, hobbled by moral illogic. To borrow from C.S. Lewis, a long face is not a moral disinfectant. The man who beats his wife regretfully, deliberately, may be a more pleasant fellow than the one who does it in a drunken rage, but the difference to the wife is slight.

In fact, there’s something funny about using the fact that we realize something is wrong as a permission slip to do it. Feeling bad about something doesn’t make it the right thing to do. Maybe feeling bad is a tipoff that it’s the wrong thing to do.

Wolf, I’m afraid, radically underestimates the capacity of the human heart to rationalize, to wheedle with the voice of conscience until it gives up in confusion.

Applying her moral strategy to adultery highlights the problem: This fling feels necessary to my life for innumerable reasons, I promise I’ll feel bad about it afterwards, and I’ll make it up to my spouse and kids (“mending”) in many ways.

Sorry, it doesn’t wash.

Second, I believe Wolf underestimates the punch this remorse can pack. When I was writing my book,”Real Choices,”I interviewed women across the country about the difficulties that caused them to choose abortion. I found, however, that they could not resist pouring out the far-worse pain that came after the abortion.

Sometimes these women had reacted first with frantic abortion-rights activism, but gradually a horrifying realization grew until it became a millstone burden:”I killed my baby.”Few realizations could be worse.

Some of these women found the grief erupting in drug abuse, promiscuity, divorce, depression, eating disorders, self-loathing and suicidal thoughts.

Pro-life pregnancy support centers find the demand for post-abortion grief counseling growing at a high rate (including the recent development of groups for men).

Something like critical mass is being reached here. We can no longer pretend that abortion empowers women, or that it’s a reasonable, regretful choice.

When women are doing something they don’t want to do, something that makes them miserable, 4,000 times a day, it’s not liberation that we’ve won. Abortion is just the bizarre new form of an old, old oppression: changing women’s bodies at the cost of their tears, instead of changing society.

Last year,”Jane Roe”herself came to admit that truth. May she be the first of many.

MJP END GREEN