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 Saving Lives, Teaching Values, Healing Souls
Birthchoice, the Gabriel Project, Family Honor, Project Rachel
By Rich Reece
It was the first week in December, and a young woman was walking up the sidewalk in North Raleigh with a heavy heart. She and her husband could barely support themselves and their three children, and now they’d learned that another child was on the way. They had decided she would have an abortion. As she approached the clinic, though, she noticed several people just off the property praying the Rosary. Hesitantly, she walked over to where they were and asked why they were praying. When she learned they were praying for her, and for her unborn child, and that people would help her keep her baby, she broke down. There was no way she could go through with this. It was wrong.
Betty Rogosich, Director of Birthchoice, a service that tests, counsels and provides resources for women with unexpected pregnancies, calls a moment like this a ’rescue.’ “We were able to offer the family help,” Betty said. “We did an ultrasound which showed a baby with a beautiful heart beating at six weeks, and we put them in touch with the Gabriel Project, which is helping them now.”
In his 1995 encyclical, Evangelium Vitae, Pope John Paul II famously indicted the “Culture of Death.” In the face of this culture, however, passionately committed faithful in the Diocese of Raleigh are working to build a Culture of Life. Four organizations that respond daily to the material, spiritual and educational needs that surround the beginning of life are Birthchoice, the Gabriel Project, Family Honor and Project Rachel.
“I’ve met very few women who actually ’want’ to have an abortion,” Betty says. “Most women know instinctively that abortion is wrong, but they feel backed up against the wall and can’t find a way out.”
“Some women we see are considering abortion because they are unsure if their boyfriend will stay with them and become a good father. Others became pregnant hoping to marry and start a family. Instead, faced with responsibility of caring for a family, the fathers have abandoned them. Single women who already have children are sometimes overwhelmed with their duties and have gotten into a situation with a new boyfriend only to find that he leaves after she becomes pregnant.”
“We see college students afraid they will have to drop out of school, and high-schoolers worried first of all about disappointing their parents and then about being punished. Sadly, we find many parents of teens pushing their daughters to abort. Luckily there are some teens who decide to place their babies for adoption.”
“Married women come in sometimes with their husbands. They’re facing financial instability. They both need to be working outside the home, and being pregnant will eventually necessitate her stopping.”
“The tragic thing is that all these situations can be helped. At Birthchoice and with the Gabriel Project, we provide loving support and encouragement, financial help with a utility bill, rent, clothing, groceries and baby items.”
The parish-based Gabriel Project, now operating out of eight parishes in the Diocese, provides emotional, spiritual and material support for women faced with ”crisis” pregnancies. “Crisis” usually means “unexpected,” says Darcy Holley, who coordinates the Gabriel Project for three parishes, and has been with the Project for nine years. She estimates that 60% of the referrals her group receives are from Birthchoice, while the rest come from word of mouth or people noticing their brochures in parishes.
“We work with an incredible variety of women,” she says. “We’re working with one couple now who are expecting triplets, and the dad is suddenly unemployed. Another woman’s husband was in the army and went AWOL, leaving her with a three-year-old, a baby on the way and no income, no savings, nothing. A neighbor noticed what was going on and contacted us. A third woman was shot during her pregnancy. She went through three surgeries and the baby is alive and well.”
The Gabriel Project provides baby items, maternity clothing, transportation, sometimes money for rent or utilities or help finding employment. It’s clear, though, that spiritual support is part of the ministry that’s especially close to Darcy’s heart.
“We’re forever praying for the moms,” she says. “We don’t judge anyone or push religion on them, but if they’re comfortable we’ll pray with them, ask them to come to Mass with us. We do everything we can to relieve the burdens so they can realize that their baby is a blessing and a cause for joy, not worry.”
After the baby is born, the relationship with the family doesn’t end for Gabriel Project volunteers. “A lot of times that’s when it really begins,” Darcy laughs. Like Betty Rogosich, she is a godmother to one of the babies she’s helped welcome into the world.
The respect for life that Darcy and Betty bring to their ministries is what a third program, Family Honor, hopes to instill in youngsters approaching adolescence. Linda Gaviria, Director of Family Honor, says, “We want to explain the meaning of chastity and the truth about God’s plan for sexuality, love and family, so children understand what it means to be made in the image of God, and how our bodies are meant to reflect that image with Christ-like love.”
Family Honor, developed by Family Honor, Inc., in South Carolina, is more than sex education. “We regard the parents as the primary educators of children in sexuality,” she says. “That’s why we require them to accompany their children at all the sessions. Also, unlike sex education, we emphasize the development of the whole person, not just biology and functions. We talk about the essential dimensions that make total sexual persons, what we call SPICE: spiritual, physical, intellectual, creative and emotional.”
Family Honor currently offers two programs in the Raleigh Diocese: Changes & Challenges for sixth-graders and Real Love & Real Life for eighth-graders. Parishes host the programs; St. Andrew in Apex will be the site for programs in late January and April this year.
Both programs are generally held in the evening, one week apart, for either two or four weeks in a row. Each session lasts about two hours.
“Imagine a large room filled with parents and children. They’re sitting together and the child knows this is a special time with his or her parent. We set up lots of colorful graphics and props. Then we do a series of fun, interactive presentations on various topics.” There are small group breakout sessions (girls with moms, boys with dads) on subjects like communication, opposite-sex friends and risky behaviors.
The programs are grounded in Scripture, the Catechism of the Catholic Church, Humanae Vitae and Pope John Paul II’s Theology of the Body. “We explain the difference between chastity and abstinence,” Linda explains. “Chastity is a virtue ’a positive habit developed over time’ that says Yes to God’s plan for human sexuality and love. It’s sexual energy rightly directed, sexual reverence, restraint and respect. It’s a virtue that should be brought into marriage.”
One sixth-grader commented after Changes & Challenges, “I learned that sex is much more than what most people think.”
Not every unexpected pregnancy has a happy ending. Sadly, 4000 abortions take place every day in the U.S.; 30% of abortions are experienced by Catholic women and 50% of all abortions are experienced by women under the age of 24.
Betty Rogosich acknowledges that “Sometimes we face discouragement, especially when a woman has just seen her baby on the ultrasound screen, moving around, with arms and legs waving and kicking, perhaps sucking his thumb, and then she asks “Where can I go to get the procedure?” What gives us hope is faith in God’s love and mercy. These women usually return or call after the abortion regretting their decision and searching for help. We talk and pray with them and offer them Project Rachel.”
Project Rachel assists women and men who are suffering from the emotional and spiritual aftermath of an abortion. Jackie Bonk, Director of Project Rachel in the Diocese of Raleigh, speaks with obvious compassion for the people she meets in her ministry.
”We have seen women and men aged 16 to 75. They are rich and poor, some are involved in the Church and some have fallen away from the Church. Some are not even Christians. The one thing they all share is that at one time they were pregnant or fathers to be and in desperate circumstances. They may have been lacking family support, resources or the ability to make a good decision. They may have been told they would be abandoned if they did not have the abortion.”
Abortion creates a deep spiritual wound in these men and women, Jackie says: ”Dozens of clients come to us after many years of unsuccessful therapy. Counselors may tell them that the abortion is not the problem; and this creates more confusion. A woman who has experienced abortion will often say that she does not feel worthy of forgiveness and love because she did not respect the gift of life that God gave her. She will hold on to the shame and the depression as a punishment for this sin.”
Healing from an abortion experience is often a long process, Jackie explains: “The abortion experience is unnatural and the societal message to deny the pain is so strong that individuals will take extraordinary measures to avoid recognizing and dealing with the trauma.” Some clients don’t come to Project Rachel until decades after the abortion. “Facing the experience,” Jackie says, “takes immense courage.”
The goal of Project Rachel is to help the post-abortive mother or father look at the event for what is: a loss of a child. At that point, Jackie says, they can begin to address the other emotional issues such as guilt, shame, anger and grief: “They can then choose to forgive themselves and others who may have been involved in the event. They can turn back to God, to His love and mercy, and accept themselves as God knows them, as lovable and worthy in His eyes.”
“God can reconnect and reconcile what was once disconnected,” Jackie says. “The parents receive the grace to reclaim their child who is in heaven; and begin an eternal relationship with the child. This is an awesome miracle because God transforms a painful, terrible wrong into a gift of reconciliation and love.”
The Gabriel Project Needs a Shed
The Gabriel Project is constantly receiving and disbursing donated items. The rent for storage space consumes funds that could be used to help clients directly. Do you have a shed or a storage space in the Cary or Apex area that you could donate to the Project? Call St. Michael the Archangel Church at 919.468.6100.
Life Saving Contacts
Birthchoice: 919.832.3030
Gabriel Project: Contact any of the following parishes: Sacred Heart, Our Lady of Lourdes, St. Joseph, St. Raphael and St. Luke in Raleigh; St. Michael the Archangel, Cary; St. Mary Magdalene and St. Andrew, Apex and St. Catherine of Siena, Wake Forest.
Family Honor: 919.467.5527 or fhraleigh@gmail.com
Project Rachel: 919.852.1021 or email projectrachel@nc.rr.com. For more information go to http://projectrachelnc.org/. Calls and appointments are kept strictly confidential.
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