By Lorraine V. Murray (The Atlanta Journal Consitution, January 18, 2003)

"Are you somebody's mom?" the little girl asked.

I paused from cutting slices of pizza in the school cafeteria where I was volunteering for the day.

"Not really," I replied.

The child looked disappointed and wandered away.

It was hard to know how to answer her question. I am a mother if you count the baby that died before it was ever born, but I am not a mother if you count living children only, since I have none.

I was a passionate feminist in my younger years, espousing the extreme party line without question. If a man held a door open for me, I paid him back with a chilling look.

Women were men's equals in every way, and there was nothing a man could do that I couldn't unless you counted lifting weights and fixing cars, which I would get around to someday.

When I found myself single and pregnant and scared, I barely hesitated before making my decision. An atheist, I had studied the arguments for and against abortion, and I believed that a woman's rights always took precedence over the fetus.

I didn't realize, however, that my life would never be the same when I walked out of the women's clinic that day.

The "procedure," as I mentally dubbed it, was far more painful than I had ever imagined, but the physical torment was nothing compared with the emotional trauma that developed afterward.

Memories of the event began gnawing at my heart, and I grew teary-eyed whenever I encountered a baby. Before long, I began reliving that afternoon in the clinic over and over.

Gradually, I realized the unbearable truth. The medical procedure had not been simple. I had taken a life.

Years later, when I returned to my childhood faith, I felt like I was dragging an invisible whale into church with me, and it was my guilt. I knew the church offered the sacrament of reconciliation to all sinners, but I feared my sin was too hideous to divulge.

One day, I finally sought help from a priest in the confessional. After I'd stopped crying long enough to tell my story the priest quietly reminded me of Christ's words as he hung on the cross.

"Father, forgive them, they know not what they do."

He explained that the men who had killed Jesus had not realized whom they were killing, just as I'd failed to realize the moral implications of my actions that day in the clinic.

"But Father," I said, weeping, "what happened to that little soul?"

"God takes care of the little souls," he replied with infinite tenderness.

When I left the confessional, I felt a great weight had been lifted from my heard. God had forgiven me, I reassured myself.

That was not the end of the journey, though, because the flashbacks returned and I began sinking into a dark well of gloom. Maybe God had forgiven me, but I was still holding a grudge against myself.

One day I saw a notice in our church bulletin about a Christian group called Post Abortion Treatment and Healing (www.healingafterabortion.org). I soon was telling my story to Mary Ann McNeil, a big hearted lady who promised to help me.

Her tender ministry, based on scriptural readings and prayers, stemmed my torrent of tears, and one day I awoke to discover that my heart had finally healed. Still, each year on the anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the memories return, and a simple question, like "Are you a mother?" touches me in a profound way.

If I could have answered that little girl in the cafeteria more truthfully, I would have replied that no child on earth calls me "mother," but I trust there is one in heaven.

Lorraine Murray is the aurthor of "Grace Notes." She works in the Pitts Theology Library at Emory. E-mail: lorrainevmurray@yahoo.com.

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