By Susan Brinkmann, OCDS
Staff Writer
An alumna of the University of Notre Dame, who received no help in 1999 when she experienced an unplanned pregnancy just months before graduating, says the Obama invitation encourages Catholics to reduce the abortion issue to nothing more than “dining-room talk.”
According to a report by the Catholic News Agency (CNA), Lacy Dodd, a 1999 graduate of the university, explained in an essay appearing on the website of the journal First Things how she became pregnant by her boyfriend in the last semester of her senior year at the school.
She told how she had run to the school’s famous Marian Grotto after testing positive for pregnancy.
“I was confused and full of conflicting emotions,” Dodd wrote. “But I knew this: No amount of shame or embarrassment would ever lead me to get rid of my baby. Of all women, Our Lady could surely feel pity for an unplanned pregnancy. I recalled her surrendered love to God’s invitation to become the home of the Incarnate Word. ‘Let it be done to me according to thy word,’ she had said. In my hour of need, on my knees, I asked Mary for courage and strength. And she did not disappoint.”
She said her boyfriend, also a Notre Dame senior, tried to pressure her into having an abortion.
“Like so many women in similar circumstances, I found out the kind of man the father of my child was at precisely the moment I needed him most. ‘All that talk about abortion is just dining-room talk,’ he said. ‘When it’s really you in the situation, it’s different. I will drive you to Chicago and pay for a good doctor.’”
Replying to her insistence that this was not an option, he said he was pro-choice.
“I responded by informing him that my choice was life. And I learned, as so many pregnant women have before and since, that life is the one choice that pro-choicers won’t support.”
Dodd said it was her family who helped her by welcoming her unborn child into their hearts. She also relied on the people at the Women’s Care Center, a pregnancy support center in South Bend, who provided her with information on how to stay healthy during the pregnancy.
At one point, Dodd considered adoption but decided to raise her baby instead. She graduated from Notre Dame with a bachelor’s degree in American Studies and earned an ROTC commission as a second lieutenant in the U.S. Army.
Her baby was born on All Saints Day and was named Mary.
“Her name is no accident,” Dodd writes. “This Mary was living inside me while I walked the campus of a university dedicated to a woman who is mother of us all, and it was Mary Our Mother who gave me courage when I was afraid of what would lie ahead.”
She noted that one in five women who have abortions is a college student and this is because the notion that abortion is a woman’s only choice is entrenched on U.S. campuses.
“On campuses all across this country, abortion is the status quo. We need to change that with an unambiguous stand for life, and Notre Dame needs to be in the lead,” she said.
She closed with a question to Fr. John Jenkins, the president of Notre Dame:
“Who draws support from your decision to honor President Obama—the young, pregnant Notre Dame woman sitting in that graduating class who wants desperately to keep her baby, or the Notre Dame man who believes that the Catholic teaching on the intrinsic evil of abortion is just dining-room talk?”
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