Urgently After Roe, Birth Mothers Should Be Celebrated

‘I ’ll sue you if you don’t provide her medical care.” That was Lidia’s response to the reckless doctor who botched her abortion at 26 weeks. “Your daughter will be a mental vegetable incapable of having a normal life. You should leave her to die on the table,” he said. Lidia was an immigrant living in poverty in New Orleans and no doubt had no idea how she would follow through with that threat. But a mother’s instinct kicked in, even as she had intended on walking out without that baby on that day in January 1990.

Sarah Zagorski writes about her earliest moments in a chapter of the new book Choose Life: Answering Key Claims of Abortion Defenders with Compassion, with a foreword from Alveda King, a niece of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. Zagorski imagines the horror of the scene: “I can almost see her surroundings as she lay bare in front of the physician. Perhaps there were blood-stained linens beneath her, rusty medical equipment beside her, and maybe my tiny feet were barely in her view.”

As an abortion survivor, she writes in thanksgiving for her mother. “I was not breathing when I was born, so he determined I would be better off dead and that my family would be better off without me.” Her mother was wise enough to know that neither she nor the doctor who was infamously known for “cheap” services “was qualified to make life-and-death decisions, to adjudicate permanent determinations” about the baby’s future. Whatever was going through Lidia’s heart and mind (she died in 2010), Sarah Zagorski is eternally grateful.

She also believes that another reason she is alive is that an abortionist had been sued nine months earlier. He had left a baby’s remains in a mother’s uterus. The threat of another lawsuit couldn’t have been too enticing.

Zagorski’s gratitude is perhaps all the more compelling because her early life is not a happy story. She lived in poverty with siblings who were all suffering, even starving at time:

My mother was afraid my affluent, astute birth father would abandon her — he did. She was afraid her depression and mental illness would prevent her from providing for my basic needs — it did. She was afraid her sexually perverse husband and abusive sons would prey on me – they did. She was afraid that in the end she would lose me — she did. Her fear was grounded in reality.

That same Sarah Zagorski works today for Louisiana Right to Life. I recently spent time with her at a working group on adoption at the Catholic University of America’s Columbus School of Law, discussing ways to better help women and children and families survive and thrive. She knows how fragile life is — and how fragile a mother’s decision to choose it is. She also knows the miracle of not only life but adoption. She has a little one herself now, too, loving him sacrificially and abundantly. Our culture and its practices and policies and laws should be ordered toward helping make all of this possible. With gratitude in abundance.

Zagorski was adopted at nine and was given the stability and sanity she needed. Her poor birth mother was a victim of domestic violence as a child and in her marriages. An immigrant, she fled an abusive father in Honduras. Her first husband married her to become a citizen, and he beat her. Her second husband, we learn in her book, was an abusive alcoholic who sexually molested her children. These are all too often the circumstances that drive women to abortion. This is nothing like empowerment.

About her heroic birth mother, Zagorski writes:

She lassoed fear by rejecting abortion and giving me the opportunity to escape. The depravity of my childhood home did not destroy me. My mother’s oppressors did not get the last word, and her mistakes as a mother did not have final authority over my life. I escaped death’s grasp because of her courage, and I found that on the other side many pro-life people were waiting to help me and my family.

Don’t be paralyzed by circumstances, Zagorski wants to say to each and every pregnant woman feeling hopeless and desperate.

For my mother, oppression followed by fear was abortion’s doorway, as it enticed her to act against her conscience. And oppression is the life theme of many abortion-minded women, of whom my mother was the archetype of sorts. My mother was just like the majority of women who have abortions, and she lived in constant fear.

That fear doesn’t have to be the end of the story.

It was only as an adult that Zagorski could piece together all the elements of her birth mother’s story. She was never able to express her gratitude; during her birth mother’s life, she assumed she was merely unwanted. Life is much more complicated than that. And in this post–Roe v. Wade country, we need to band together — pro-life and pro-choice — to make sure women who want their babies can flourish. Civil society is going to play a major role, and that really means every single one of us in increasingly loving and creative ways. Zagorski is a witness to what is possible. Let’s make the early lives of the next Sarahs even better by paying more attention and providing more opportunities for women to be freed from oppression before abortion is the only option they feel they have.

This column is based on one available through Andrews McMeel Universal’s Newspaper Enterprise Association.