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Thanks, Hef

By G.M. Corrigan, wagginway@mindspring.com

It came hard on the heels of an oleaginous public admission by America's sturdiest symbol of satyriasis, the septuagenarian Hugh Hefner, that he longed to bestow his photographic favors on either 22-year-old Britney Spears or the married Catherine Zeta Jones.

And it was perhaps the most jarring countercultural protest ever to haunt the demonstration area of the U.S. Supreme Court's steps.

Some 25-30 women, declaring membership in a non-partisan, upstart international movement called the Silent No More Awareness Campaign, braved sub-freezing temperatures; mainline feminist ridicule, and public exposure January 22, 2004, to tell assembled on-lookers and media that—contrary to the cultural canon—the abortions they procured have hurt them in many ways.

Hailing from various parts of the U.S. and Canada and carrying signs that read "I Regret My Abortion," each stepped to the microphone to make her heart-rending statement and assurance of available healing—and, for the two-and-a-half hours of searing, twilight testimony, seemingly turn back the cold and the night.

"It is time for the truth to be told," declared Georgette Forney co-founder of the non-denominational campaign. "It is time for us to take our message to the public and let the world know that abortion is bad for women...We're your sisters. We're your neighbors. We're your wives. We're your friends. We're your co-workers. And we are real women. And we are here to say [that] we regret our abortions, and it must not continue. We must do better for women.

"Abortion supporters wave hangers in our faces," Forney went on."They want to scare women. They lie and say our babies are blobs of tissue. They do not care about women. They care about abortion....The truth is [that] our society today is not better off [with] legal abortion. It hurts us, and it hurts our families. It hurts our children."

Author, model, movie star, and campaign spokesperson Jennifer O'Neill—in a wheelchair because of a broken foot—followed Forney to the microphone.

"I find it very interesting that any individual...really thinks that they have the ability to ultimately thwart God's plan of creation," O'Neill imparted. "It is comforting to know--even to those of us who have had [an] abortion—that our babies are in heaven....

"You are going to hear today from women who have had abortions, who regret it--who wore the t-shirt, if you will, [including myself]—to really know first hand...that abortion isn't anything of what [we were] told."

Decrying her practitioner's fulsome reference to her gestating baby as "a blob of tissue," O'Neill added, " ...abortion hurts women. You can't kill your own young and be well afterwards. The fact is that many of us have suffered alcohol abuse or drug abuse [because], as statistics show, we want to be loved.

"We can't deal with the fact [of the abortion]. Relationships fall apart. I had nine miscarriages on the way of having my two other children...and that's from scarring from my abortion. Abortion hurts women....We will be silent no more."

O'Neill was followed by organization co-founder Janet Morana, who pointed out that the disinterred pain that the assembled speakers were about to relive was not undertaken lightly, but borne to give the lie to the abortion industry's claim that legal abortions are without major complications.

"What they're here to do is to ask you—especially the media—to get the truth out; to tell other women [that there are] better choices than abortion, and by choosing abortion it [will] not solve their problems."

Niece of assassinated civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Dr. Alveda King, followed Morana to say: "...I can be silent no more. My uncle was Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.; my dad was his brother, Rev. A.V. King; my granddaddy was 'Daddy' King....I did have one abortion, and I was going to have another one....And I did not get that one.

"But the one I got was very similar [in circumstance to Forney's]....But right after I did it, I began to wonder: Did the baby feel it? Did it hurt? Was it a boy? Was it a girl? And I went through that until 1983, when I was born again. And I was assured by the shed blood of Jesus Christ that I was forgiven and that I would see that baby again. But even today I wonder: was it a boy; or was it a girl...?

"Abortion kills," King fumed. "Abortion hurts. Abortion hurts women. It hurt this woman. And it hurt all these women who are here today. And it hurt all the women who are not talking about it yet. And the women who are very adamant and say that they don't feel a thing [are] numb; and I'm praying that God will let them come through that process and let them feel again. Because abortion hurts women."

Adding that abortion also hurts men—complicit or overruled—as well, Forney introduced Stephen Imbarrato, a man who saw through "The Playboy Philosophy" of sex as sport and inhibition-ouster too late to save his blindsided children.

"Thirty years ago I wasn't a real man. I'm a complicit post-abortive man," Imbarrato admitted. "Basically thirty years ago my girlfriend at the time had an abortion because of me. She did it for me....And about three months later I saw a big change in the whole personality of my girlfriend...and I asked her..., 'You're not right; there's something wrong.' And she said, 'I can't get over the fact that we've killed our child.' And I said, 'You know, I feel the same way.'"

The relationship eventually broke up, Imbarrato said, leaving him with the realization that if he had not taken the noncommittal I'll-support-you-whatever-you-decide position but instead had reaffirmed his love for both mother and child, his twins would be with them today.

"So really I'm here to not only tell my story," Imbarrato continued, "but...I'm trying to be like 'Everyman' and apologize for men to women for our complicity in not being real men to women and real men to these little babies." And so it went for two-and-a-half hours of blazing, frigid, and largely unreported newsmaking: spell-binding, if politically incorrect, cries de coeurs of wounded people, grappling with their humanity and the anti-woman deceptions—such as Hefner's "philosophy" and the "safe and legal" myth--they said helped them undermine that humanity.

In one riveting swipe at an underreported aspect of this contended deception—the medical establishment's rejection of an abortion-breast cancer connection—a young woman in shirtsleeves approached the microphone. Tearfully she spoke of her abortion, her bout with breast cancer, and the remaining children she so loved—and then, in a most un-Playmate-like manner, raised her shirt to bare a scarred chest as testimony to that contention.

In another "Cosmo" counterpoint moment a woman in full wedding dress spoke of her abortion, the damage it did to her self-respect and ease with men, and of her regret—and then poignantly mused that she would never get to wear the dress for real.

At once rueful and rousing—and crashed by a "pro-choice" picketer who ignored Forney's pleas to respect the solemnity of the moment—the event spoke of how 48 percent of American women, 15-40, have been duped by false feminism's mimicry of men's sexual predation and of a culture's stampede toward carnality and contempt of motherhood.

But it also spoke of how American men, specifically, have let women down; how, in our bi-partisan adulation of tease and titillation, of Hefner and Hustler, of Britney and Madonna we have thrown our friends and lovers to the wolves—and to the state for protection.

Corrigan is a writer who lives in Northern Virginia.

First published March 24, 2004.