At the end of August, I posted this about an article in the National Catholic Register called "The Other Church Abortion Teaching: Mercy".

That article has sparked a spate of letters to the National Catholic Register. One week after it was published, the NCR ran a letter to the editor by Ginalynne Mielko bitterly complaining about it. Mielko's say that the article "put a spin on sin" by referring to "loss" rather than "murder". Mielko claims that by favorably covering post-abortion ministry, the NCR is "lessen[ing] the severity of this sin."

The following week, NCR published a letter from a woman who is part of Rachel's Vineyard. Her name was withheld, but she mentioned that she had had two abortions and had been able to come back to the Church because of the efforts of ministries like Rachel's Vineyard. She encouraged Mielko to seek out "authentic church teaching" on post-abortion ministry.

This week, NCR has published two much longer letters-to-the-editor fisking Mielko AND a full-length feature article about another of the ministries I feature here on my blog, Lumina.

One letter-writer, Nancy Montgomery, said "Abortion is loss and post-abortive women do suffer intensely, often after being deceived about fetal development during a time of crisis, despair, isolation and coercion. In post-abortion ministry, a focus on this aspect of the experience--loss--is a necessary part of therapeutic experience. Identifying loss means recognizing the value of human life and the extent of abortion's harm. Isn't this what pro-lifers want?"

Another writer said: "The epidemic of post-abortion grief, injury and death is denied by abortionists and censored by the media for a reason: They know it will be abortion's downfall. Polls show that Americans (finally) understand that abortion kills a child, but they still support legal abortion because they think abortion helps women. Americans don't realize that abortion is killing women, too."

Finally, the article about Lumina is a needed corrective to the focus of the earlier NCR article on non-post-abortive Church members who "provide care" to what is often portrayed as a permanently wounded, rather pathetic, population of needy post-abortive women. The article is a profile of Theresa Bonapartis and is fittingly titled, "Another Church Abortion Teaching: Hope."