Ohio Abandoned Women and Babies Last Week

H ave you ever had your birthday celebrated? As a child? As an adult? Perhaps it’s hundreds of people sending you Facebook messages you can’t keep up with. Or maybe a lovely dinner with your spouse. Or a sibling or a friend does something special for you. Or you receive a handmade card from your child.

Whatever it is, many of us know the showering of love that can happen on a birthday. Others don’t. I’ve learned that from the Sisters of Life in New York. So many of the women they serve — who come to them pregnant and in need of support — have never had a birthday celebrated. The women often come to them abortion-minded because of desperate circumstances. These Catholic nuns love on them. And that includes making a big deal about their birthdays. I’ve been a recipient of their birthday love. They truly celebrate the gift of life.

The night of the unprecedented leak of the draft of the Supreme Court decision in the Mississippi abortion case that ultimately ended Roe v. Wade, the first public reaction of the governor of New York was to tweet about her infant granddaughter’s right to choose abortion. Governor Kathy Hochul, of course, wouldn’t have her beloved granddaughter if her daughter had chosen abortion. And: Why are we thinking about your infant granddaughter in a situation where she is pondering abortion? Surely, we can hope for something more lifegiving for her. Why even think of her in a sexual context? This is National Adoption Month, and Hochul reminds me of the couples who have had to seek legal counsel to foster or adopt in recent years because they would not answer hypothetical questions about gender transitions for children who are theoretical. In truth, there are suffering children who need the kind of unconditional love of a birthday, not an ideology.

Speaking of legal counsel: Two weeks before the Dobbs decision that ended Roe, the New York legislature passed a law directing the Department of Health in the state to

conduct a study and issue a report examining the unmet health and resource needs facing pregnant women in New York and the impact of limited service pregnancy centers on the ability of women to obtain accurate, non-coercive health care information and timely access to a comprehensive range of reproductive and sexual health care services.

The last thing the Sisters of Life wanted to have to do was go to court, but they quietly fought the targeting of not just their ministry, but the women they so love. They didn’t want this to become a political issue. They didn’t want women to be scared to come to them, for fear that their medical records and personal circumstances would become some kind of political football. Pregnancy is so intimate, the fears that come with an unplanned pregnancy should not be subject to political debate. The Sisters of Life only want to love.

Mercifully, Becket, a law firm that specializes in religious liberty, secured the freedom this month not only for the Sisters of Life and other pro-life ministries in New York State but also the most vulnerable women and their children, who exist in a hostile environment here. Other states, post-Dobbs, are in competition, but New York is known as the abortion capital of the United States.

Oddly, I give thanks for the ridiculous need for legal intervention, because it’s an opportunity to talk about the Sisters of Life. My friend Sister Maris Stella, their vicar general, commented, when all was said and done: “As Sisters of Life, it’s our privilege to walk alongside each woman who comes to us and to stand in solidarity with her, helping her to move in freedom, not in fear.” She added:

We are grateful for this victory, which protects our right to continue to uphold and defend the beauty and strength of women. In over 30 years of serving women in the State of New York, we have learned that what a woman really needs is to be seen, heard, and believed in, which is why we are committed to providing the necessary emotional, practical, and spiritual support for her to flourish. We are called to bring hope, comfort, and joy to women who feel they have nowhere else to turn. The judge’s order will protect us as we continue our ministry.

On Election Day, Ohio just expanded abortion — enshrining abortion rights in its constitution — eradicating even parental consent already on the books in the state. That vote didn’t happen because people love abortion. It happened because voters are unsure of what is going on — unclear about what women’s options are. The last people in the country you want to silence or encumber in any way are the Sisters of Life. They make love known. They receive women as they are and love them back into life, as they have so often been used and abused and not seen as the beautiful gifts that they are to the world.

We need a new birth in our culture, where women and their babies are received in love with an outpouring of resources. The Sisters of Life and so many others who do not make headlines give witness to this. Whatever our politics, may we prepare them room? And support those who do?

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