In a play about abortion.
Bennett College undertakes a creative, compassionate and rational treatment of this volatile controversy.
In the late 1960s a young woman gets pregnant by a partner who abandons her and she feels that becoming a single mother will thwart her dreams to make something of her life on her own terms. So with reluctant determination the young woman visits an old woman to have an abortion.
The old woman had resorted to becoming an abortionist to support her family after her husband had lost his job. But she felt such great guilt over her choice that she went to a Catholic church to pray for absolution at the feet of a statue of St. Lucy.
St. Lucy, who was martyred c. 304 during the Great Persecution under Roman emperor Diocletian, was born in Syracuse, Sicily to noble and wealthy parents. Beautiful and virtuous, she intended to leave her inheritance to the poor and so was denounced as a Christian. During her torture one of her tormentors attempted to rape her, but she gouged out her own eyes rather than submit to him and her statues traditionally depict her holding her eyes on a tray. The old woman was horrified to feel St. Lucy’s eyes watching her as she walked through the church, so she vowed to make every effort to ensure that some good would come out of the evil of her work.
So the old woman performs the abortion, but in a nurturing, motherly way she counsels the young woman that she must learn from this painful experience and go on with all the more resolve to make something of her life. Years later when fate brings the young woman and old woman together again, events bear out that, as difficult as it was, in this case this decision was the right one.
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Abortion in a nurturing and motherly way? If this is the compassionate and rational treatment of abortion, I would hate to see the mean-spirited and irrational treatment. After reading Tom’s post at Disputations today For the thousandth time, no about the ends never justifying the means, it reminds me how often this principle is ignored. It is a good thing that I am not the world dictator or there would be a lot of people writing repeatedly on chalk boards “The end does not justify the means, The end does not justify the means…”
3 comments
Sick, sick, sick.
“Dirty Dancing” the 1987 film that launched the careers of Jennifer Grey Patrick Swayze and Jerry Orbach is set in 1963 and presents a very sympathetic woman seeking an abortion and an abortionist. Propaganda to remind folks in the Reagan years how bad it was for women in the 1960’s.
Same dirty trick played by the liberals every time. In order for their argument to succeed they must divorce the act from the reality of the situation and proceed on emotion only. The fact that a human child is killed is never discussed. Everything is played from the emotional impact on the mother – the only thing that matters – as divorced from the fact that a child has been killed for the sake of the mother’s freedom.