Suffering With Joy

A Hidden Cost of Abortion

January 24, 2011

Last week I posted my second article at Suite 101.  As I wrote a first person account of how many years ago I, as a peon with no authority, changed my work relationships, the principle behind my actions raised a question about how aborting over 53 million babies since Roe v.Wade has impoverished the world.

Games People Play

How to Influence People and Build Relationships – A Simple Secret is a story of personal empowerment through giving positive, honest, and sincere recognition to others.

In the process of writing it I reconnected with my Transactional Analysis training from the 1970s.  Psychiatrist Eric Berne’s book Games People Play took over the popular lexicon but, to me, the core value of Berne’s theory was and remains the concept of the “stroke economy.”

Yes, that’s TA jargon.  A stroke = one unit of recognition.  Claude Steiner, Ph.D. followed in Berne’s footsteps coining the term “emotional literacy” as he developed the theory of strokes after Berne died.  Here is the heart of the matter as Steiner writes it:

Strokes are transactional units of recognition. Research has shown that strokes are required for actual survival in young children and psychological survival and health in grown ups. Strokes can be generally divided into positive and negative based on the subjective experience of the recipient; positive strokes are pleasurable, negative strokes are painful.(Click here for more on this subject).

True love knows no limits.  A society capable of true love cannot kill its babies in the womb, but a society burdened with either a stroke deficit or habitual negative interactions certainly can. The babies not here have left terrible holes in our lives – the personal costs to the mother and father and deprivation to society of their presence and gifts.

They are the persons we will never get to know – persons who may have been just the ones to reach out and heal suffering hearts; persons who were God’s gift to a family and the world;  persons we dismembered and threw back in God’s face.

Berne’s stroke theory is a secular explanation of interpersonal dynamics. True Christian living resolves the stroke deficit in people’s lives. Catholics call it living the Beatitudes through the corporal and spiritual works of mercy.

A hidden cost of abortion is the further impoverishment of the world – fewer people to truly see, love, and connect face-to-face with others rather than their iPods, Blackberries, cell phones, televisions and computer screens.  Fewer people to live the corporal and spiritual works of mercy.

Sarah Palin and Trig: A Child Brings Joy

We gadget hungry, frenetic citizens of the twenty-first century are withering away spiritually and sucking the potential out of society because too many of us are alone in a crowd frantically going nowhere and turned inward. We have killed many who might well have given us what we need the most – human affirmation of our value as persons – the hidden love of the Divine. We have killed many who could have called us to be the best that we can be, multiplying the effect of true love for the good of all.

Because of their national recognition, Todd and  Sarah Palin, by joyfully and unconditionally accepting all their children, but especially a Downs Syndrome child, are showing the world what strength loving interaction can bring to the smallest unit of society, the family.

Yes, we are all sinners.  That is why society will never be perfect and families will suffer from the sins of its members as the Palins have.  But in a public way, they are an example of the good that can be.  They are a sign of hope and of what we are all called to be and do: loving Christians on the journey to eternal life. They said “yes” to God.  When will our society say “yes” to Him by ending our impoverishment caused by abortion?

Want to subscribe to posts by email? Visit the third box in the sidebar.

V.  Praised be Jesus Christ!

R.  Now and forever.  Amen.

(Click on the link above to read why I am ending my posts with this.)

Tags: pro-life

1 Comment to A Hidden Cost of Abortion

1. 

   Excellent way to put it. Who is not with us, those could have shared their lives with us, but were snuffed out due to another’s selfishness? God forgive us.
   Evan recently posted..Sunday Snippets–A Catholic Carnival
Evan on January 30th, 2011