Project Rachel: Healing the pain of abortion

By Donis Tracy

Pilot Correspondent

Twenty-six years ago, Beth made a life-changing decision. Faced with an unwanted pregnancy, she chose to abort her unborn child. For years, she carried the pain and guilt of her decision alone.

“It absolutely affected my daily life,” said Beth (not her real name).

“If someone came in to work with a new baby, I’d just take off,” she recalled.

Her abortion also shook her faith. “I felt I didn’t have the right to stand in front of Jesus,” she confessed.

Two severe depressions later, Beth admitted she needed help. “I was self-destructing from the pain, the shame and the self-hate,” she declared.

She contacted Project Rachel — an outreach program run by the Pro-life Office of the Archdiocese of Boston for those traumatized by previous abortions. The name is derived from the Biblical text: “Rachel mourns her children; she refuses to be consoled because her children are no more. Thus says the Lord: Cease from your cries of mourning. Wipe the tears from your eyes. The sorrow you have shown will have its reward. There is hope for your future” (Jr 31, 15-17).

After speaking with a counselor and, subsequently, a priest, Beth experienced not only sacramental forgiveness, she also began to forgive herself.

According to Beth, she realized, “If God can forgive me for what I did, I can begin to forgive myself. It doesn’t atone for what I did, but at least I’m no longer self-destructive. We become fractured as women and we become fractured with God. Most of us are so bogged down with shame and self-hatred that we can’t conceive of anyone loving us and forgiving us. We feel we have to spend the rest of our lives paying for what we did.”

“Project Rachel offered me a new beginning,” she continued. “It helped me to see God in a different light — not as a punishing God. It really gave me insight into God’s love and forgiveness.”

Beth is not alone.

“It’s important for women to understand that they are not alone in carrying the burden of guilt and grief,” said Marianne Luthin, director of Project Rachel in the archdiocese. “We want women to feel the comfort and the love of God’s forgiveness.”

“Abortion is so totally anti-woman,” she said.  “It can destroy the very being of women.  We [at Project Rachel] have seen and experienced the great pain that women who have had abortions have experienced.”

Although Project Rachel programs are operated independently in each diocese, they all focus on the necessity of men and women dealing with the aftermath of abortion in order to experience reconciliation — both with God and with their unborn child.

In the Archdiocese of Boston, Project Rachel conducts a variety of programs aimed at helping men and women reconcile with their past actions. There are two retreats held each year; there is a hot line manned by trained counselors; there are several prayer services. Luthin noted that confidentiality is one of their prime concerns. “Anyone working in this ministry is committed to complete confidentiality. Every contact we have with women — whether by phone, in a retreat setting, in a prayer setting, whatever the setting — is strictly confidential,” she stressed.

“Many women speak to us after years and years of silence, because they are concerned that they will be judged harshly,” said Luthin. “[They] want to speak of their story without fear of condemnation or judgment.”

Luthin praised Pope John Paul II’s encyclical Evangelium Vitae, in which he specifically addressed women who have had abortions, writing, “Do not give in to discouragement and do not lose hope. Try rather to understand what happened and face it honestly… give yourselves over with humility and trust to repentance. The Father of Mercies is ready to give you His forgiveness and His peace in the Sacrament of Reconciliation. You will come to understand that nothing is definitively lost, and you will also be able to ask forgiveness from your child, who is now living in the Lord.”

“What a gift the Church offers to those who are looking for healing,” marveled Luthin.

Since its inception in 1984 in the Archdiocese of Milwaukee, Project Rachel has helped thousands of women and men heal the pain and guilt of past abortions. These ministries have spread to 160 dioceses throughout the United States, as well as in Guam, Canada and Australia.

According to Vicky Thorn, founder of Project Rachel, “two things came together” to prompt her into heading a post-abortion ministry program. First, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops issued a pastoral letter in 1977, which called for a post-abortion ministry program. Second, Thorn herself had witnessed the negative effects an abortion had on a friend.

“I watched my friend for years suffer through destructive behavior because of the abortion. She always said, ‘The adoption I can live with; the abortion I cannot,’” recalled Thorn.

Beginning such a program only four years after the legalization of abortion in the United States proved to be quite a challenge. “There were no experts. No one knew anything about the effects of abortion on women,” stated Thorn. Seven years after she began building the program, Project Rachel was born.

“I look at [Project Rachel] as a vital ministry — one that helps rebuild women,” said Dr. E. Joanne Angelo, assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at Tufts University School of Medicine. Dr. Angelo has been involved with Project Rachel since 1986, the year the program was launched in the Archdiocese of Boston. Over the past 17 years she has served the program in a variety of ways — counseling men and women, training priests and other psychiatrists on the effects of abortion of women, and implementing other Project Rachel ministries throughout the United States.

She has witnessed first-hand the havoc abortions wreaked on women’s lives.

“These women not only have to grieve the loss of a child, they have to grieve that loss of a sense of themselves as a good person,” she explained.

According to Dr. Angelo, oftentimes women who have had abortions are not allowed to grieve for their child. In a paper written for Ethics and Medics, a publication of the Pope John Center for the Study of Ethics in Health Care, Dr. Angelo wrote, “society offers her no assistance in mourning. She is expected to be grateful that her problem is solved and to get on with her life as if nothing significant had happened.”

“The beauty of Project Rachel is that many women are enabled to understand the love of God and the forgiveness of God with our wounded human nature,” she stated. “They are the wounded healers who will lead us to better understand the dignity of every human life.”

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