Here is another little tidbit about Plain Dealer columnist, Regina Brett. On Jan. 19, 2003, for the thirtieth anniversary of Roe v. Wade, Brett wrote a column entitled "A simple and complicated act." In this article, Brett gave her eyewitness account of a teenager's abortion. Brett accompanied the seventeen-year-old girl and her mother to the clinic and even stayed in the examining room with the girl while the abortion was performed. She wrote, “I secretly hope she will change her mind and jump up off the table. I want to stop her, but it’s not my place, so I pray for her and the baby, and, as I do, I realize that she’s been praying all along. The decision to have an abortion is said to be between a woman and her doctor. Perhaps it’s really between a woman and her God.” Brett concludes her article by saying, “The teenager knows that she has ended a life. She wants to make peace with it, to pray for it, to say goodbye to that life, and to start hers.”
In other words, Brett gave aid and comfort to a girl during her abortion. She sat back and literally watched while the baby was sucked out of this young mother. She was, in fact, formally complicit in this girl's act. Then she wrote this self-serving article, justifying the girl's abortion as a "simple" but "complicated" decision. Anyone who helps someone else procure an abortion incurs an automatic excommunication. Yet Brett continues to trumpet her loyalty to the Church and to receive Communion at her parish.
I recently wrote to Bishop Lennon about Brett and included copies not only of Brett's article about women's ordination but also the article on Brett's trip to the abortion clinic. Let's hope that this bishop censures this loud-mouthed dissenter.