Published April 23, 2004
Russian women must struggle to meet needs of their children
In Magadan, Russia, pregnant women have come to Father Michael Shields with a dilemma: to have an abortion or to spend their lives struggling even harder to make ends meet and raise a child, often as a single parent.
The priest encourages those women to do the latter. But the advice is not "just empty words," Father Shields said. Four years ago, he convinced a woman in an abusive relationship with an alcoholic man to keep their child. Now, with about $100 a month, Father Shields helps the single mother pay for phone service, day care for her son and the bus fare to her 78-hour-per-week job at a grocery store.
"She is a struggler and I will help her as long as she needs it," Father Shields said in an e-mail interview with the Anchor.
For many Russian women, that support never comes. For every two live births in the country, there are three pregnancies that end in abortion, according to a report by the Council of Europe, an international human rights organization with a focus on Europe’s post-communist democracies.
The grieving women behind many of those abortions are the reason Father Shields invited a Rachel’s Vineyard retreat facilitator to the Russian Far East to offer four weekend retreats for women who have had an abortion.
Diane Szurleys will travel from Ketchikan April 23 for a one-month visit to Magadan and Vladivostok. Rachel’s Vineyard is a ministry of Priests for Life that conducts Catholic and interdenominational retreats and trains others to help women heal spiritually after abortion. Szurley’s trip will mark the first time Rachel’s Vineyard retreats will be offered in Russia.
The Catholic retreats planned for Russia involve prayer and reconciliation, Mass and adoration of the Blessed Sacrament. Retreat-goers are asked to share their abortion experiences. They are given a doll to name and keep for the weekend and then to part with during a therapeutic mock funeral service that concludes the retreat.
The use of props and ritual are meant to awaken the senses, Szurleys said, "because your senses are dead basically after you’ve had an abortion." The retreats are about "letting go," she said.
Szurleys had an abortion when she was 19. She described her life in the years following it as "dysfunctional." She dropped out of college. She felt guilty, depressed and suffered anxiety attacks. Instead of attending her parish, the Catholic woman sat on the steps of the church at night and cried.
"I couldn’t stop the pain in my heart no matter what I did," she said.
Even after she married and became pregnant with her first child, she feared God would punish her family for her decision to abort 13 weeks into her pregnancy.
"I never felt forgiven or clean," the 53-year-old mother said.
But she was able to reconcile with her grief and shame through Rachel’s Vineyard and became a retreat facilitator five years ago. About half of the organization’s retreat facilitators are post-abortive women, Szurleys said.
At the retreats, "There’s a group of people that are not going to judge them, that are not going to throw stones at them, that are just going to love them and let them grieve the loss of their baby."
Father Shields, a priest of the Anchorage Archdiocese who is pastor of the Nativity of Jesus Parish in Magadan, said he’s been searching for a way to comfort women he meets who suffer from the aftermath of abortion.
"It was so obvious that the violence of this tragedy plays a deep role in women’s lives," he said.
Father Shields has been serving in Magadan for the past 10 years. He said many women see no alternative to abortion in the face of "small apartments, the alcoholic husband or live-in man … no resources, no support." In Far East Russia, he said, those factors have led to women using abortion as birth control.
After making an announcement about the Rachel’s Vineyard retreats, Father Shields said one woman who has had 16 abortions said the experience was a "terrible curse" and that "education, healing and help financially and materially" could help prevent more abortions.
Donations to the "Mission to Magadan," an outreach effort coordinated by the Anchorage Archdiocese’s Russian Desk, enable Father Shields to allay the financial burden of raising a child in Magadan, where he said a "normal family" not affected by alcoholism or unemployment or extramarital affairs is "hard to find."
Szurleys said everyone shares in the responsibility to minister to women and couples considering abortion.
"When a woman comes and says, ‘I don’t know what to do; my parents kicked me out, my boyfriend doesn’t want me, I have no other alternative,’ " she must receive assurance that she and her child will be helped financially and emotionally, she said. "Most of the people only need to have somebody say, ‘I’ll help you, don’t do it.’ "
About 90 teams offer Rachel’s Vineyard retreats in the United States and more than 10 other countries. In Alaska, retreats are offered twice a year in Juneau and sometimes in Ketchikan.