Notes and service details from a one-day conference on prayer after abortion. A useful resource for those who may wish to understand and try to meet the spiritual and pastoral needs of Christian men and women and their partners after the termination of a pregnancy.
This short booklet includes details of a service of reconciliation and healing for those who have been hurt by abortion and the people who care for them.
Then there are hospital chaplains who are called to the bedside of parents whose baby has been aborted on grounds of some genetic or developmental anomaly and they want a funeral rite said for their baby. The same chaplain, in one of the most difficult areas of this ministry, may be asked to take a small casket of the aborted remains of several babies to the hospital incinerator and pray for them as they are committed to the fire.
Less commonly, one of both parents of an aborted baby may seek out pastoral care in their parish, many years after an abortion decision has been made. Rarely, the surviving co-twin of an abortion operation, made on an unsuspected twin pregnancy, may seek out a priest or pastoral worker to remember and pray for their lost twin.
Promoting the idea of praying after an abortion and creating special prayers for that purpose may sound to some as if the Christian church is condoning the act. Torn between the idea of providing pastoral care where it is much needed and the need to appear at least neutral on abortion as a moral issue, priests, religious and layworkers receive little or no guidance on this subject and are left to their own devices.
Now that abortion has been legally available for more than forty years, we have several generations of men and women who have experienced at least one or more abortions in their lives. It is time for those who make decisions about these things to address this issue and make sure that pastoral care for people after abortion is made widely available.
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