PRAYER AFTER ABORTION [PDF: FREE DOWNLOAD]  See inside this book
Notes and service details from a one-day conference on prayer after abortion. A useful resource for those who may wish to understand and try to meet the spiritual and pastoral needs of Christian men and women and their partners after the termination of a pregnancy. This short booklet includes details of a service of reconciliation and healing for those who have been hurt by abortion and the people who care for them 
How can we pray after abortion? For those who are concerned with providing good pastoral care, the issue of abortion is a thorny one. In my research for a book of prayers and model liturgies for use after miscarriage and stillbirth I came across the issue in various ways. We know that Christian groups concerned with the general issue of abortion pray on a regular basis for the progress of political attempts to bring abortion to an end. Then there are hospital chaplains who are called to the bedside of parents whose baby has been aborted on grounds of some genetic or developmental anomaly and they want a funeral rite said for their baby. The same chaplain, in one of the most difficult areas of this ministry, may be asked to take a small casket of the aborted remains of several babies to the hospital incinerator and pray for them as they are committed to the fire. Less commonly, one of both parents of an aborted baby may seek out pastoral care in their parish, many years after an abortion decision has been made. Rarely, the surviving co-twin of an abortion operation, made on an unsuspected twin pregnancy, may seek out a priest or pastoral worker to remember and pray for their lost twin. This subject is not addressed in training institutions, other than as a global principle: that if parents are grieving after the death of their baby, regardless of how that baby died, then that grief can be addressed in the same way, and for the same reasons, as the grief following on any other loss. The issue of en-soulment may crop up in theology, and questions such as when does an embryo created by IVF become a human being may be addressed in medical ethics. The issue of abortion is glossed over, it seems. Promoting the idea of praying after an abortion and creating special prayers for that purpose may sound to some as if the Christian church is condoning the act. Torn between the idea of providing pastoral care where it is much needed and the need to appear at least neutral on abortion as a moral issue, priests, religious and layworkers receive little or no guidance on this subject and are left to their own devices. Now that abortion has been legally available for more than forty years, we have several generations of men and women who have experienced at least one or more abortions in their lives. It is time for those who make decisions about these things to address this issue and make sure that pastoral care for people after abortion is made widely available. I would like to see regular public liturgies of memorial and healing for those involved in abortion. As a step towards this, we could begin to gather ideas together about how this could be done. As far as I am aware, my own book ÒNot out of MindÓ published in 1998, remains the only published work on this subject. I would be glad to hear from any other individuals or groups who have done similar work, so a more up-to-date work can be created.
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