Bishop Vasa of the Diocese of Baker (that's in Oregon) attended a Rachel's Vineyard retreat in February. He wrote his weekly column about that experience. His column is available here. Scroll down to the February 19 entry.

Here are some excerpts:

The women who came to the Retreat did not necessarily connect their various continued life traumas to their respective abortions but they had tried every other kind of therapy and something in their lives was still, 'not right'. The book Forbidden Grief talks about the various manifestations of this unresolved grief. Many of the signs were clearly evident in the small group of women gathered at the Rachel's Vineyard Retreat; disrupted marital relationships, alcoholism, drug addiction, eating disorders, sleeplessness, nightmares, flashbacks, depression, suicidal ideation, anxiety, compulsive shopping, hopelessness, extreme shame and guilt. The 'lie' of the abortion industry that these problems could not possibly be connected to a past abortion keeps many women from probing and understanding the root of their various debilities. The pro-life sign: 'Abortion hurts women' is judged and discarded by the pro-abortion and the extreme feminist crowd as so much religious claptrap but the women on this Retreat and those who walked a short distance with them know without a hint of doubt that it is absolutely true. Abortion hurts women and our societal denial of this truth allows an unsympathetic industry to continue to wreak its havoc on the lives of thousands of unsuspecting women every day.

Knowing what they know now, none of the women on the Retreat would make the same choice! I am extremely sad for them. I pray for them. I pray for all those women, millions of them, who have believed the lie and now live in denial, still trying to believe the lie while their lives crumble around them.

Any legislator or public person who protects or defends abortion, particularly those who claim to be Catholic, should first read Forbidden Grief and attend a Rachel's Vineyard Retreat and then see if they could still be so glib about this right of a woman to make a totally uniformed choice of such grave consequences.

Men, who are truly men in the best sense of that word, could not ever allow their beloved to risk suffering this grief or to side with the heartless abortion industry which simply says, “Get over it! Imagine what your life would have been like if you had not had the abortion”. Believe me, these women do imagine precisely that! They wonder what the child would be like, who he or she would look like, the voice, the smile, the joy in the eyes, the beautiful ring of the word: “Mommy”. They imagine it all! That is their grief; they do imagine what their lives would be like if they had not had the abortion. What a singular grief, a horrific grief, a forbidden grief, a hidden grief and it is suffered by millions and denied a million times over.