Blogpost, Ann Lynch. 

My name is Ann Lynch, mother, grandmother and now great grandmother, frantically knitting three more shawls for babies soon to be welcomed into our family.  I am a professional musician by training, fascinated by the way music can unlock the door to healing of painful memories from the past and to reach into memories lost as dementia takes over. 

Having lived in many parts of the country, we moved to Nottingham, which has been our home for many years now; where I became involved in leading a music group in our local parish church, served on the diocesan liturgical commission for several years and also became involved in an ecumenical prayer community. When our youngest son started school, I became involved with the music department of a college of further education and it was here that I started to hear from students and staff members describing emotional pain that was destroying relationships and affecting their work and studies. I recognised some of what they were describing as being similar to what I had felt following several miscarriages, as being linked to baby loss.

Before coming to Nottingham, I had trained as a youth leader with counselling and realised they were describing the trauma of abortion, including the pain of guilt, anger and bottled-up grief.  This was also happening on weekend retreats the prayer community was leading where people were coming for a deepening of their faith and for healing. This was 10 years after the passing of the Abortion Act in 1967. For some of the people it was appropriate to share what had helped me to come to terms with the loss of my babies and that it was a process that could not happen overnight. During these conversations, the question was often posed as to what the baby might have been like at the time of the abortion and as we discussed the development of the baby from conception up to that moment the realization soon came that they had taken a life, a first step on the way to healing. Almost always they asked why they hadn’t been told the truth, that they thought it was a procedure that was performed long before a baby had been formed.

After much thought I started to prepare a paper on the effects of abortion on the mother and other family members and just before I met with Bishop James McGuinness and Canon Soar, a priest of our diocese who held masses of reparation for the abortions that were taking place to discuss this with them and to lay down the foundation of a process to bring about healing, I received a package from Dr. Anne Speckhard, at that time a professor of the University of Minnesota, giving initial findings on her research into abortion. She is now a world authority on the effects of PTSD. I never found out how she came to send these details to me, but her research was fundamental in showing how much trauma so many women were suffering. This research was eventually published in a paper on “Psycho Social Aspects of Stress Following Abortion”. She concluded her paper with the following statement: “A spontaneous recovery is not characteristic. If treatment is not given to these women, they may only continue to worsen.” Her research helped me to put together notes on post-abortion counselling together with much other information to help the healing process.

At the same time, a group of us from various walks of life realised the need for factual information particularly amongst young people and for our politicians, and so the SPUC branch in Nottingham was formed. Over the years we have been active in all aspects of SPUC’s work, from the annual Silent Witness to leafletting and fundraising, particularly the White Flower collections, but in recent years we have made a concentrated effort to support students to go to the Youth Conferences, as well as encouraging others to attend the National Conferences.  It is so important to keep abreast of what is happening nationwide and to connect with others and to know that there is a whole community of pro-lifers out there.

A key moment for many of us was when we undertook the SPUC Speakers’ Course which enabled us to go into schools and colleges, to not only speak about abortion, but also be able to educate about the development of the baby. We encourage our members to participate in these courses whether or not they are able to become a speaker, as they give so much information, including the tools to share with confidence the pro-life vision with work colleagues, family members and others pro-lifers might meet.

I have always been pro-life, aware that we are made in God’s image and likeness, but it was only after I stumbled through the grief and, later, the healing process of baby loss that I began to fully realise how precious we are to our heavenly Father. At one of the last SPUC talks I gave to a group of sixth formers, in a school that seemed to support the pro-choice point of view, one of the male students suddenly stood up at the back of the room and said, “Can’t you see what she’s saying, abortion kills babies. She’s a Christian, most of us are Muslim.  Murder is against the law, God’s law and the law of the land, we must do something about this.”  One of his A-level subjects was politics. Who knows what seeds we are sowing when we speak the truth and where this might lead to in the future?

See part 1 of the SPUC in Nottingham series here.