Pic:SMH/Facebook
The Sydney Morning Herald reports…
“The Christian Democratic Party MP Fred Nile has come under fire for a controversial post on his party’s official Facebook page linking the death of Charlotte Dawson to a pregnancy termination during her marriage to Olympic swimmer Scott Miller.
Late on Sunday, a photograph of Dawson was posted on the Official Christian Democratic Party Facebook page along with the claim that the “poignant story” of Dawson’s 1999 abortion was “left unmentioned in many obituaries”.
“Many I am sure are now aware of the tragic ending to Charlotte Dawson,” the post said. “It highlights how depression and self-harm can affect anyone.
“Charlotte Dawson revealed in her autobiography how she aborted her child with swimmer Scott Miller because he didn’t want any distractions in the lead-up to the Sydney Olympics.”
Dawson was found dead on Saturday at her Woolloomooloo home after a well-publicised battle with depression.
The Facebook page extracted a section of Dawson’s 2012 memoir Air Kiss & Tell in which she said she felt “a shift” after the termination.
The Twitter hashtag “#teamnile” was written in the corner of a graphic featuring the quote and a photo of Dawson.
In an open letter to Mr Nile, PhD student Angela Williams wrote that she was “disgusted” by the post.
She said her post labelling the comments “inappropriate” had been removed from the Facebook page.
“Since you choose to remove my dissenting comments on your Facebook post I am writing to you here to ask why you think it is appropriate to continue the bullying of Charlotte Dawson after her tragic death,” she wrote.
“It shows that your core motivation is to drive forward your agenda, regardless of any harm that may cause her family and loved ones, or the impact it may have on anyone facing the difficult decision to terminate a pregnancy. It also shows your absolute lack of regard for anyone struggling with mental health issues.”
Asked if he stood by the post, Mr Nile said: “Charlotte Dawson’s story is a sad tragedy as she, like many, is a victim of depression. Her story needs to be told because, if it could happen to a strong and successful woman such as Charlotte, it can happen to anyone. May she finally be at peace. Our sympathy and prayers are with her loved ones.”
In an apparent move to limit the fallout from the comments, Mr Nile tweeted a link on Monday afternoon to a Change.org petition calling for tougher cyber bullying laws.
“Please sign this petition to support ‘Charlotte’s Law’. Let’s make cyberbullying laws tougher in Australia,” Mr Nile wrote from his official Twitter account @frednile.
Dawson attempted suicide in August 2012 following a string of abusive Tweets from trolls, including one who told her: “Go hang yourself.”
The Change.org petition had attracted almost 35,000 tweets by Monday afternoon.
It is not the first time there have been calls for state and federal governments to crack down on cyber bulling.
A similar petition called for changes to the law in the wake of the suicide of 15-year-old bullying victim Chloe Ferguson.
Attorney-General Greg Smith’s office said late last year that the government had “no plans for any new legislation in this regard”.
“The Standing Council on Law and Justice [set up by the Council of Australian Governments] considered this issue in October 2012 and agreed existing offences provided adequate coverage,” a spokeswoman said at the time.”
Group Sects 
“There are those who seem to use it as a form of birth control – but I imagine they are actually few in number.”
In some countries it is. Women in public hospitals in some countries are given a lecture on birth control after giving birth and abortion is just one of them.
“The fact is that there is an emotional cost to abortion – and that needs to be addressed and spoken about honesty!”
Absolutely. Even in countries where they never hear about abortion from a religious point of view, there is psychological damage. Most women will always wonder about the child that could have been.
And you were of course right Greg with your original post.
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That’s a really great article you posted Bones
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There’s no way Charlotte would want to be the catalyst for anti abortion legislation – she would however have wanted to have women feel they could get more counselling, more support – more real information about the likely emotional issues involved. I don’t support anti abortion legislation. I am pro-choice simply because I can’t for the life of me ever think of a reason I wold have an abortion and that makes me think that any one who has had one must have had a phenomenal reason to do it. There are those who seem to use it as a form of birth control – but I imagine they are actually few in number. The fact is that there is an emotional cost to abortion – and that needs to be addressed and spoken about honesty! There is an emotional cost to many of the things we do in life that we don’t therefore say we’ll never do, or legislate against.
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A Christian who chose abortion
January 5, 2012 By John Shore
Got this in a couple of days ago:
Dear John,
I don’t really know you well enough to share this, but there will never be anyone in my own church I could share it with. The article you did on abortion [Christians and abortion: what are we, babies?] really touched my heart.
I was once a judgmental Christian who, on one occasion, even got up before a congregation and gave my testimony about how thankful I was that I had not ever had an abortion, and never would.
This was just after a very very dear friend of mine had decided to have an abortion. I felt smug and somehow better than her—like somehow I would have made a better, more godly choice than she did.
Well, I lived to regret every word of that perfect Southern Baptist testimony, when, in years to come, I faced the very thing that I had been so sure was so wrong.
Many times I have wished that I made the choice I did because I was in a life or death situation. I think I even told myself, many times, that I was in such a dire situation. But that is just not true. There were circumstances that were unusual, but not physically life-threatening. I had just had a baby; he was four months old when my father died after spending a month on life support. I didn’t even know I was pregnant until about a week after my father’s funeral. I had been given every kind of sedative and tranquilizer medication during that month and after the funeral. I was left with a broken mother, three kids under six years of age, a husband out of work, and a very shaky marriage. I had complications with all my pregnancies, but no one told me my life was at risk. No one said, “It’s your life, or your baby.”
I prayed, “Dear Lord, I cannot do this. What am I suppose to do? Do I give up my three children, and my mother who needs me desperately right now?” Because I knew that, in the mental state I was in, I would not make it through another pregnancy. So I quickly made the arrangements and went through the process like a robot.
My youngest son, who will soon be 25, was four months old when I had the abortion. (Wow…I have never written those words before.)
I have lived with the shame and disgrace of what I did for twenty-four years, and basically condemned myself as a murderer unworthy of God’s love.
I lost my precious mother in 2005 without ever sharing my story with her. She would have been the one person who would have never judged, but I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. I have held it in and let it hold me back all this time. I regret the act and I regret all the things that I might have done if I had not let the guilt hold me back. I have sold God short on what He was capable of doing just to punish myself. That will end up being my biggest regret and burden.
But I have never given up on God. I continue to read the Bible, and ask for His guidance for my own understanding. I try to live my life in service to my family and to others, but not a day goes by that I do not feel unworthy of any of the many blessings I have. Each day I wake up with that guilt and shame that I will never truly be forgiven. Not because God will not forgive, but because I stood up in front of people, and said what I thought I believed—and then did the exact opposite, because I did not have a clue what I was talking about.
Now, everyday, I hear people talking about what a sin abortion is, as if it is the only sin (except maybe being gay) that will send us to hell. And I don’t think about myself, but about my dear friend, and how hard it must have been for her to go through that process without my full support. I never told anyone about her decision. But she knew that I did not approve of it.
She died a few years later of breast cancer. She was like my sister, and a wonderful person. She never pretended to be anything she was not. She was like the rest of us—just doing the best she could with what she had at the time. I deserve to be judged, but she did not. So I will always stand up for people who honestly thought they were doing the right thing.
Thank you for at least demonstrating that not every Christian turns their back on people who make mistakes.
God bless you and your ministry.
Dear woman who wrote me this:
My God. How you have suffered.
So the house of your grief has four walls: for your unborn child, for your departed friend, for your parents, and for the separation from God you think you’ve suffered.
That’s a dark house, sister, a cold place to live. I’m so glad you wrote me. It means you’re moving toward the door of those unhappy quarters: that the sun and Son are beckoning you to come outside and start a better, warmer life.
You’re a Christian. And so you understand the raw, visceral horror experienced by Christ on the cross. And you know why that awesome sacrifice transpired. You know that God incarnated as Christ took into his corporeal form all of our pain, our suffering, our heartbreak, our grief, our shame, our disappointment, our misery, our fear—and obliterated all of it with the blazing white fire of his love for each and every one of us.
You know that. You know who Christ was; you know what he did; you know why he did it. And just like you know the nature and purpose of Christ, you know who and what you are. You know you’re not supposed to be perfect, unblemished, wonderful: the best friend ever, the ideal daughter, the flawless mother. You know being like that was never the plan. You know that no one ever gets to be the person they wish they were.
We were born needy and weak, and we spend our lives the same. No one gets out of that. All of us are afraid, confused, alienated, lonely, angry, selfish, appetitive, greedy, opportunistic, unjust, immoral, crazed for love. All of us are hounded by our own insufficiencies and failures.
Life, after all, is a vale of tears.
You know that. You of all people know that.
We were born to lose. We were born broken. We were born nailed to a cross.
You and I and everyone else in the world were designed, ultimately, to turn to God—to come to him with our sorry lives in our hands, pleading, “Please, take this. It’s no good to me. I can’t do it. I have failed, and know I can do nothing but. Help me. I’m yours.”
And sure enough, Christs’ consciousness begins to fill us. There, at the cross, we find the relief we seek. We find solace. We find the source of the love we cannot create for ourselves.
We find absolution.
We find that we—even we!—are forgiven.
The phenomenal thing about the forgiveness of God is that it’s very specific: it shows up with actual, specific, easily comprehensible reason behind it.
God doesn’t just forgive you; he tells you why he forgives you.
It’s obviously supremely presumptuous on my part—but, since you wrote me, let me share with you my belief as to how God sees the transgressions of yours that have for so long been causing you such grief:
Your unborn child: When you made the decision you did relative to your pregnancy, you were barely functional. You were as distraught, stressed, and grieved as a person can possibly be—and it sounds like you were suffering postpartum depression, which of course can be dangerously debilitating. And you were intensely medicated. The condition you were in was more than “unusual.” It was ruinous. I absolutely, 100% guarantee you that God forgives you for the decision you made in the condition you were in. I wouldn’t give a rat’s patoot for any god who wouldn’t. Would you? You were a mess; you prayed to God for guidance, and then you made a difficult decision. You’re not guilty there of anything. You did your job: you prayed to God. You’re innocent.
Your friend: It’s true enough that you weren’t the friend you might have been. But because that failure is emotionally tied up with the choice you later made during your pregnancy, that transgression has taken on for you a great deal more weight than it deserves. You were young when you went before your church to say how you would never have an abortion. That’s such a young thing to do: it’s so immature, so obviously an effort to be praised, to belong, to assert a winning identity. And it’s so informed by one of the primary defining qualities of youth: moral certainty. Young people can only see right and wrong in clear, black-and-white terms; they haven’t yet developed an appreciation for the infinite means by which moral blacks-and-whites become infinite shades of grey. The real failure with your experience lies with the adults who encouraged and allowed you to make such an insipid speech. An actually mature person would have told you to sit down, and be quiet. Who wants to hear a young person bragging about their moral superiority? The only reason they let you make that speech is because it served their own agenda: they essentially used you as propaganda, and no two ways about it. That’s a shame on them—but no shame to you. You’re not guilty of anything there except being young. And that (thank God!) is no crime.
Your parents: Of course it’s awful to lose one’s parents; I’m terribly sorry that happened to you. But you don’t need to feel bad anymore about not sharing with your mother the decision you made in the weeks following your father’s death. She knows now, doesn’t she? And I’m positive she forgives you that. Wouldn’t you, if you were her? You wanted your mother to think as highly of you as possible. Who doesn’t want that from their mother? I am certain that right now your mom is waiting, with God himself, to hug you long and hard, and tell you how much she loves and certainly forgives you.
Your separation from God: To me, the jump-out thought in your letter was that even though you know that God forgives you, you don’t forgive yourself. That right there is a problem; that’s a place you want to focus. What you’re doing with that calculation is putting yourself ahead of God. You’re saying that your judgment that you are not forgiven carries more weight with you than does God’s judgement that you are. It shows you’re not really letting God’s will for you be done. It means that you’re denying what Christ did for you on the cross.
That is (for lack of a better, nicer word) ego. You need to let go of that.
You are forgiven by God. Christ did die so that you could avail yourself of the absolution of God.
If you’re a Christian, you believe that.
So be a Christian. Believe that. Know that. Accept that.
Live in that.
Don’t keep your curtains closed against on the new day dawning. Throw them open. Let the Son in.
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/johnshore/2012/01/from-a-christian-woman-who-chose-abortion/
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Bones, you hit that nail right on the head.
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So do you think Charlotte would want to be seen as a catalyst for anti abortion legislation?
I thought it had more to do with bullying on social media.
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Greg I’m usually the one defending Nile against …well. the likes of you! 🙂
But, the problem is in the timing. Maybe I’m old school, but I think it’s poor form to make comments like that so close to someone’s passing. He obviously thinks the timing is right because it’s all still fresh, but he ran the risk of being seen as nasty. And pro-choice people, and anyone else who hates Nile for other issues will use it against him.
And thus say “see look at how nasty and unfeeling the Christian right is”.
Some things are best left unsaid, or at least thought about until you can decide how to say them in the best way.
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This, and I can’t believe I’m saying it, is one time when I agree with Fred Nile! It is undoubtably a massive contributory factor to Charlotte’s depression and ultimate suicide, and the abortion is told in Charlotte’s own words from her book.
There is a cost to every decision and action in life, a different cost for each of us…it is entirely ridiculous to say there is no emotional cost to abortion.
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