It has sent a cold chill down our spines. The undercover video filmed by the Center for Medical Progress which shows abortion doctor Deborah Nucatola appearing to explain that she is able to operate on her patients so that she can keep the skull and organs of their baby’s intact.
Praying for the vulnerable pregnant women who find themselves in these abortion clinics is essential. Today is St Margaret of Antioch’s feast day – she is the patron saint of pregnant mothers, women in childbirth, and nursing mothers. Prayers for women considering abortion are urgently needed.
One unfortunate development in the wake of the sting on Planned Parenthood is that there have been some condemnatory comments online towards pregnant mothers who find themselves in abortion clinics. I know – it’s horrifying – that any pregnant mother would voluntarily undergo a late-term abortion where their baby’s organs are plucked out. But I’m going to share a story about one girl so as to illustrate that some women are in dire straits.
When I was in my early 20s, I was working at Expectant Mother Care in the South Bronx. One day a teenager came into the waiting room, and before I could see her, I saw that she was asleep on the couch. When she woke, she told me she was heavily pregnant, that she had been hiding the pregnancy for many months from her mother, but that she had been found out. Her mother threw her out, with the instruction that she could not come home until she had had an abortion. At the start she was still determined not to go to the local clinic, but after nights sleeping rough, but she was losing her resolve. She didn’t know that we were a pro-life centre – she had come into the waiting room so that she could sleep on the couch. We found her a place to stay, food and clothing. But had she not met us, she was faced with the ‘choice’ of walking the streets of New York during long nights or having an abortion.
For those of us who can’t give much money to reputable pro-life groups, it is all the more pressing that we pray for the pregnant women who face gruelling pressure to abort, so that St Margaret of Antioch guides them to people who will care for them. St Margaret was a saint of the early centuries, she was the daughter of a pagan priest, and her mother died when she was an infant. A nanny was employed to care and nurse little Margaret. The nanny was a devout Christian and helped Margaret convert to Christianity, but her father washed his hands of her, so she was adopted by her nanny. A Roman Prefect asked for her hand in marriage, with the condition that she deny Christianity and sacrifice to the pagan gods. For refusing his proposal, she was viciously tortured. Like St Philomena, St Margaret was martyred by decapitation in the year 304.
Through the centuries, devotion to St Margaret has intensified in England. She is one of the Fourteen Holy Helpers – urgent prayer devotion to this band of saints was offered during the Black Plague that raged from 1346 to 1349 when so many were dying without the Last Sacraments. St Margaret was thought to have saved many from the plague. Now there are a few hundred churches throughout England dedicated to her, including the parish church of the Houses of Parliament. Such is providence that today we have recourse to St Margaret of Antioch for the multitudes of pregnant women who face abortions.
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