From heartache to hope: a pro-life journey

“This is him at 10 weeks old, the day I brought him home.”

Fran, who lives in western Maine, speaks with a mother’s love about her son, Alex, now in his 30s and a successful restaurateur.

“He’s a chef, and he co-owns two restaurants here with our dentist,” she says.

As she speaks about the joy that her son, whom she and her husband adopted, has brought to her life, she also reflects on the children she never had a chance to come to know. She lost two to miscarriages and three to abortions.

“God has brought us through it all,” she says.

Fran now shares her story with others, at the invitation of Maine Right to Life, in hopes of educating women and guiding them down a different path than the one she chose.

“I want women to hear my story, to know that having an abortion is not a piece of cake. This is a traumatic experience,” she says. “It’s just feeling the compassion and pain I feel for the children being killed.”

Fran is originally from Malden, Massachusetts. She remembers her early years with fondness but says life started to go awry when her parents began drinking. She says, as the oldest child, she tried to make things right.

“Things were insane in our family, and I was the family hero. I would call the police, and I would do those kinds of things,” she says.

Fran was baptized and received the other initiation sacraments, and she attended a Catholic school from the fifth until the ninth grade. She says, however, that transitioning from a 90-student Catholic school to a public high school with around 2,000 students proved too much for her.

“I was bewildered,” she says.

Coupled with the lack of parental support and supervision, she says she made some troublesome choices, ones that led her to stop going to church because she says she knew the things that she was doing didn’t fit in with Catholic values.

“I stopped going to church because of shame, all that shame of what I was doing,” she says.

She began dating at age 15, and by age 18, she became pregnant for the first time. She says she had no idea where to turn and felt panicked. Coming from what she describes as a dysfunctional household, she says she had no idea how to raise a child. When a former boyfriend, who wasn’t the child’s father, suggested that his mother could help her, she accepted the offer. The “help” she received, however, was to have an abortion.

“She had offered me pills at first to abort, but the baby could end up deformed, so I said no. I didn’t want to hurt the baby. Here I am saying that I don’t want to harm a baby, yet, I’m going to abort a baby,” she says. “I was so desperate. I really was. I didn’t know what end was up.”

Seeking help but getting none, the abortion was performed in the woman’s kitchen, after which Fran says the woman made it clear that she was to leave and have no future contact with her son.

Fran drifted, staying with different friends and dealing with intermittent homelessness. She struggled with emotional problems and low self-esteem.

“I was in survival mode,” she says.

She continued to have intimate relationships, and in her mid-20s, she again got pregnant. Again, she says she felt overwhelmed by the situation.

“I can’t handle this. I can’t afford to raise a baby. Given where I came from, I don’t think I’m capable of being a mother,” she says.

By the time she reached her 30s, Fran had started to put the pieces of her life together, which included earning a bachelor’s degree in community mental health and counseling from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She now anticipated becoming a mother someday, but when she got pregnant, she says the baby’s father wouldn’t hear of it. She says she pleaded with him, but he pressured her into having an abortion, and she gave in.

“This is how naïve I was. Even in my 30s, I said, ‘I can’t support a baby.’ It never occurred to me that these men would be supporting the child with me,” she says.

She looks back with regret, believing her choices would have been different if there was a support network to which she could have turned, rather than being directed towards abortion.

“Nobody supported me, even in my 30s,” she says.

She points out, for instance, that she was never given an ultrasound during her pregnancies, something she is convinced would have changed her mind about having an abortion.

“Absolutely, it would have,” she says.

Having experienced one failed marriage, Fran got married again when she was in her 30s and was now hoping to have a child. Unfortunately, perhaps because of complications from her third abortion, it was not to be. She suffered two miscarriages six months apart.

“I wanted a baby so badly, but it didn’t happen,” she says.

She describes it as being like glass shattering before her.

“I was so traumatized from having the abortions and then really coming to grips with being infertile. I was 38 or 39 when that all happened. And I mean, I really was lost. It was like my world broke in front of my eyes,” she says.

Therapy, arranged by her husband, helped her begin to heal, but she says the pain she was feeling and the time apart she felt she needed proved too much for her marriage, and it ended in divorce.

As she strove to get her life together and choose a healthier lifestyle, Fran also let Christ back into her life. She credits this in part to the influence of a Christian woman she had met who had also had abortions and who helped Fran to see that that should not keep her away from the Lord.

“That’s when I accepted Christ. I’ve been a Christian since my late 30s,” she says.

A licensed clinical social worker, Fran founded Ecclesial Christian Counseling Services to help women who have been in abusive relationships and who have gone through the trauma of abortion.

Fran met her third husband, Jerry, to whom she has now been married 35 years, and the couple adopted Alex. A job opportunity for Fran brought the couple to western Maine.

A few years ago, Fran began volunteering at Life House Maine, a community-based nonprofit that supports expectant mothers, an experience that helped to crystalize her pro-life beliefs. She says a woman she met there, Mary Pray, helped her to see that her conflicted feelings about the issue were a result of the trauma she had experienced because of her abortions.

At the same time, she says that she was drawn back to the Catholic Church, the Church of her childhood. While she had returned to Christianity, she had been going to churches of different denominations. She expresses gratitude to her brother-in-law for his prayers and encouragement.

“He sent me the catechism. He sent me all kinds of things. He sent me information about getting a rosary where every bead has a little fetus on it, and I ordered them,” she says.

She says she also met with a former colleague who is a lay Dominican. She says it was that friend who made her realize that the Catholic Church was still there for her.

“I started sharing my abortion history, and she was very supportive of me,” Fran says. “I realized I ran away from the Catholic Church, and I have unfinished business there. I loved the Church when I was growing up.”

She and her husband now regularly attend Mass at St. Catherine of Sienna Church in Norway and are seeking to have their marriage blessed by the Church.

“I just feel more whole. This is where I belong. This is where I strayed from, and it was chaos,” she says. “I kneel in church, and I feel like that little girl that I used to be, and I’m just beaming.”

She says it’s taken many years, but with the help of therapy, she has come to grips with the trauma she experienced in her life and the poor choices she made. Her healing also included going to confession and receiving God’s forgiveness, something she hopes she can help other women experience as well.

“If a woman has had an abortion, I want to communicate that you can be forgiven. I want to bring them to Christ,” she says.

She says she doesn’t know if she has any unfinished grieving to do but plans to attend the Rachel’s Vineyard retreat being held this spring in southern Maine. The weekend is intended for anyone personally affected by an abortion including women, men, relatives, and former abortion workers. Rachel's Vineyard Retreat www.portlanddiocese.org/projectrachel