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Project Rachel offers healing after abortion

Abortion is as American as baseball, hot dogs and apple pie.

Planned Parenthood touts it as a "cherished freedom" right up there with our First Amendment rights. Your average politician swears by it.

And an estimated 29 million American women have had one or more.

"There is not a family in the nation that has not been touched by abortion," asserts Vicki Thorn.

"We are a nation of walking wounded."

Mrs. Thornis the founder of Project Rachel, a ministry that deals with the tragic aftermath that abortion inflicts on women.

When Vicki was in high school in the 1970s, she had a friend who became pregnant by her brother. The girl's mother took her to get an abortion.

Vicki was heartsick as she witnessed her friend's misery, but had no idea how to help her.

By 1984, however, Mrs. Thorn, then the director of the Milwaukee Archdiocese's Respect Life Program, knew enough about the issue to formulate a program to help women and men as well whose lives had been traumatized by abortion.

The ministry, which is sup­ported by the Catholic bishops, spread to dioceses across the country.

Then Bishop William Keeler started Project Rachel in the Baltimore Archdiocese in 1992.

"He had also started Project Rachel in his previous diocese of Harrisburg; he knew its good fruits," says local Project Rachel Director Tami Koerber.

Mrs. Koerber became involved in it when her husband, com­poser Francis Koerber, contacted the archdiocese to find out who could perform the Requiem for the Unborn he had written.

He was directed to Fr. Blair Rarun, pastor of St. Patrick's Church in Fell's Point and the original director of Project Rachel.

"I had read about Project Rachel and I was very excited about the Church's compassionate outreach to women, says Tami.

"I felt like the Lord was giving me some vision for the impact of this ministry, both in the lives of individuals and in the Church as a whole."

She began working with Project Rachel in 1993. Before Father Raum died in May of this year, he requested that Tami succeed him as director.

Since its inception, Baltimore's Project Rachel has helped hundreds of women to heal from the emotional wounds caused by abortion-wounds that our secular society claims don't exist, but are all too real for the women who bear them.

The post-abortive woman "has lost her child, but she can't grieve, because to do so would be to admit she has killed her own child," Father Raum once explained. 'Then some­thing happens that breaks her denial, and then all of the pain comes up."

"Perhaps the sight of a baby stroller will trigger the memory of the baby she doesn't have," says Tami.

Or certain milestones in the passage of the lives of children the start of school, Mother's Day, First Communion, holidays will activate feelings of regret and grief.

Tami gets calls ranging from girls in their teens all the way to women in their fifties and sixties.

"I've had women call from home in the middle of a chemical abortion, and others up to 45 years after their abortion."

They call, she says, "when they realize that the pain in their life is in some way connected to the abortion in their life. It may be that, for the first time, someone hears, 'If you had an abortion, there's help for you.'"

Project Rachel offers one-on­one sessions with clergy, mental health professionals and spiritual directors, or a weekend healing retreat, or a combination of both.

Tami, who is a full-time, paid director, is aided by 18 to 20 volunteer lay ministers, who undergo "discernment" training based on the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola.

The ministry is open to women and men of all faiths-they have had Orthodox Jews, Methodists, a Buddhist-or those of no faith.

'Their pain is obviously not the result of 'Catholic guilt,'" Tami points out.

"What they have in common is that they've lost children; that transcends cultures, economics and religion."

But although one has to be sensitive to the beliefs of others, Project Rachel is clearly a ministry from the Archdiocese of Baltimore, she says.

'The retreats are Scripturally based. We're very clear in our approach, but the response from each woman is her own.

"We've never found any woman to be resistant to ideas such as the communion of the saints. They've been very respectful of our Catholic traditions, and often very interested."

The process of healing involves the woman reconciling with her child, with the Lord and with herself.

'1t's that third stage that's typically most difficult for women to do on their own," says Tami.

"Many women say they know their child has forgiven them, and the Lord has forgiven them, but they will say, 'I can't forgive myself' which is an indication that more healing needs to be done."

Mrs. Thorn outlines the steps toward healing for post-abortive women as:

1. Telling her story.
2. Hearing about God's love and mercy.
3.  Grieving for the child. To help her though the grieving process, she is encouraged to do things she would have done if she had had the baby: name it, have it baptized, have a memorial service, write the baby a letter.
4. Dealing with her anger toward the people who abandoned her.
5. Moving on to positive, life­giving experiences. She's tree now to go back to love her family, her husband and children.

The weekend retreats, held at the Project Rachel Center in the Brooklyn section of Baltimore, are generally scheduled every other month, six times a year.

"Because abortion is such an isolated experience, a woman is likely to think, 'I don't hear anyone talking about it, so 1 must be the only one,'" says Tami.

"Retreats give women the opportunity to be with others who have the same pain. The circumstances of each woman's abortion are always different, but the pain is the same."

Tami says she is always moved by "the incredible amount of pain that people walk in with, and to be a witness to each woman's experience of God's unconditional love and forgive­ness.

"I'm not the one who does the work," she insists; "it's the Lord who does it. I get to watch!"

For more information or to contact Project Rachel, phone 410­354-6900.