So much for "nobody loves abortion"

The "Sacrament" of Abortion (HT: Defend Life)

Patricia Baird-Windle, self-professed wiccan (witch), actually said, “Abortion is a major blessing, and a sacrament in the hands of women. ... At the very crucible of the sacrament of abortion work is that some women have an abortion out of love for the baby, [some] out of love for the children they already have and are having a hard time feeding.”

An Episcopal “priestess,” Carter Hayward said, “Abortion would be a sacrament if women were in charge. Abortion should be a sacrament even today. I suspect that for many women today, and for their spouses, lovers, families and communities, abortion is celebrated as such, an occasion of deep and serious and sacred meaning.”

The sidebar links to a PDF of additional quotes along the same lines:

"Women's right to choose is what I, as a Catholic, dare to call sacramental. ... Reproductive choice is a sacred trust and women are more than equal to the task. Bringing this to public expression, 'praising our choices' as poet Mary Piercy has said, is something that a just society will celebrate as sacramental." (Mary E. Hunt, former member of Catholics (sic) for a Free Choice Board of Directors, "Abortion in a Just Society," CFFC newsletter, July/August 1988)

"When my turn came I stretched out on the table, feet in the stirrups, ready to let my little darling go. ... I realized that, even if my head and my heart accepted the loss, my uterus still saw it as a mortal threat and was protesting with all its strength in an effort to protect its little lodger. I was very proud of my uterus for doing its job so well! ... The next day life went back to normal. But curiously, several friends I met asked me: 'What's going on with you? You're so radiant today, you're absolutely glowing.' What's going on is that I've just had an abortion and lived an impossible love and accomplished a great reconciliation with myself. But it was my secret and my gift." (Ginette Paris, The Sacrament of Abortion)

You can't make this stuff up.

Time to revisit The Revenge of Conscience:

[W]e aren’t gently wafted into the abyss but violently propel ourselves into it.

....

Holding conscience down doesn’t deprive it of its force; it merely distorts and redirects that force. We are speaking of something less like the erosion of an earthen dike so that it fails to hold the water back, than like the compression of a powerful spring so that it buckles to the side.

....

Even when suppressed, however, the knowledge of guilt always produces certain objective needs, which make their own demand for satisfaction irrespective of the state of the feelings. These needs include confession, atonement, reconciliation, and justification.

Now when guilt is acknowledged, the guilty deed can be repented so that these four needs can be genuinely satisfied. But when the guilty knowledge is suppressed, they can only be displaced. That is what generates the impulse to further wrong.

....

The need for reconciliation arises from the fact that guilt cuts us off from God and man. Without repentance, intimacy must be simulated precisely by sharing with others in the guilty act. .... Violation of a basic human bond is so terrible that the burdened conscience must instantly establish an abnormal one to compensate; the very gravity of the transgression invests the new bond with a sense of profound significance. Naturally some will find it attractive.

The reconciliation need has a public dimension, too. Isolated from the community of moral judgment, transgressors strive to gather a substitute around themselves. They don’t sin privately; they recruit. The more ambitious among them go further. Refusing to go to the mountain, they require the mountain to come to them: society must be transformed so that it no longer stands in awful judgment.

....

Sin ramifies. It is fertile, fissiparous, and parasitic, always in search of new kingdoms to corrupt. It breeds. But just as a virus cannot reproduce except by commandeering the machinery of a cell, sin cannot reproduce except by taking over the machinery of conscience. Not a gear, not a wheel is destroyed, but they are all set turning in different directions than their wont. Evil must rationalize, and that is its weakness. But it can, and that is its strength.

We’ve seen that although conscience works in everyone, it doesn’t restrain everyone. In all of us some of the time, in some of us all of the time, its fearsome energy merely "multiplies transgressions." Bent backwards by denial, it is more likely to catalyze moral collapse than hold it back.