(BIO: Vicki Thorn is the founder of Project Rachel, a national post-abortion ministry to women and men. The mother of six and a grandmother for the first time this year, Vicki and her husband, Bill, live in Milwaukee.)

Kristen: Tell me about your childhood.
Vicki: I was an only child. My mother and her two sisters were all career women. She was delighted to be pregnant with me at 40 – and she had a miscarriage after me. She did quit work after she had me.
 
And, I came from a very Catholic family: Catholic grade school staffed by German Benedictines, and then I attended a Franciscan boarding school for girls as a day student.
 
Kristen: No bad memories of ruler raps, huh?
Vicki: No. The Franciscans took over when I was in 6th grade. It was really cool to me because the nuns were friends with each other. They laughed and they weren’t afraid to let the joyful side of their religion show. I remember that the 6th and 7th grade teachers were good friends. They used to pass notes!

(BIO: Vicki Thorn is the founder of Project Rachel, a national post-abortion ministry to women and men. The mother of six and a grandmother for the first time this year, Vicki and her husband, Bill, live in Milwaukee.)

 
Kristen: Was your family religious?
Vicki:  One of my aunts never married, and she was my godmother. She was such a role model for me. She drove when nobody else drove. She had a Nash Rambler thater that the power company provided for her. Part of her job as a home economist was to teach people how to cook on an electric stove. She was very faith filled. She kept a holy hour, and took me to benediction on Saturday nights.
 
Kristen: How about your dad?
Vicki: Dad came from a big family and he was orphaned. My dad never talked about the family much. I know when his mother died, he told me she said to him, “Now, Tony, when things get tough, remember to pray.” That’s a powerful legacy for a teen of 15.

Kristen: Yes indeed! Did you go to college?
Vicki: I went to the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. I was active in the Newman Center. You know, it’s interesting that many of the people who were active early on in the pro-life movement were there at U-Minn at the same time. It wasn’ t that we even knew each other. I graduated in 1971. When I look back and see who was there, so many prolife names were there.
 
Kristen: It was a very turbulent time, wasn’t it? How did the abortion issue affect you?
Vicki: Actually, I would say we were all sideswiped by Roe v. Wade. Some people saw it coming, but it wasn’t the young college students, like us.
 
When “Roe” legalized abortion, among some people there was a collective gasp. A lot of people were so stunned. “What in the world?!” that kind of reaction.  My own awareness stemmed from a high school friend, who already had a baby placed for adoption. Her brother was the father of the second baby, and her mother forced her to procure an illegal but safe abortion.

Over the years, we would talk, and her life was a mess. She would tell me, “I can live with the adoption, but not with the abortion.” I was certain this abortion was not good for her, and yet her situation was so abusive! People paint pro-lifers as cruel and heartless, but that just isn’t true.
 
Kristen: Did you go to Mass in college?
Vicki: I hadn’t worked out and owned my own faith at first.  I remember one day standing on the street near the Newman Center which I hadn’t discovered yet, asking, “Why am I here? Why am I Catholic? ” And then I wandered over to the Newman Center for noon Mass and the homily answered the questions I was wrestling with. “I can answer your questions right now,” God said. And you move to that next level of faith development. “I am Catholic because I choose to be Catholic.”
 
Kristen: So, you met Bill in college?
Vicki: Yes, we met at Mass, during the kiss of peace. There was a shock of electricity when we touched. (laughs)  I was dating other people. But God made sure I paid attention to that one! Good thing God introduced us. So much that’s happened in both of our lives, wouldn’t have happened if we’d married other people.
 
Kristen: That Newman Center must have been a great influence on all of you!
Vicki: Yes, the Newman Center people were really our very close friends –It’s a shame on some campuses there is no Newman Center. It was a very intentional community with the same values.
 
Bill always talks about how the bishop used to send the priests who were thinking about leaving there, and we had, I think, seven different priests in the Newman Center. This was actually good for us, in that we realized that our faith is our responsibility, not the priests’. We had to make our faith our own. That is a valuable lesson to learn.
 
Kristen: So, you married, had kids, then...
Vicki: Well, we ended up in Milwaukee with our first three little ones. Then, Bill had the opportunity to teach at the Gregorian University in Rome. He was the first layman to teach at the “Greg.” Of course I went with him, with a 5 and 3 and 1 year olds. That was one of my more naive moves.
 
 It was a really hard year. My mother had died right before I left, and it was a year of spiritual disconnect (not darkness). It was just the grief and all.
 
But it was very productive spiritually.  Bill and I would take the kids along and just visit all the churches. They would play in the corners while we took it all in.  We were very active in the parish, and yet I had a sense of being disconnected from everything – sort of, loss and moving away and young kids – and Bill was busy going back and forth to school.
 
Kristen: That stage of motherhood can be difficult before you add grief and moving into it. Those main childbearing years are really hard.
Vicki: Formative hard, you know? I had no one to talk to because I wasn’t fluent in Italian, and I was in a suburb and everyone worked. But, we got to know the seminarians at the North American College.  They babysat for us, and we took them to for dinner. They loved having the kids around, and that was a lovely experience.
 
Kristen: Your mom worked. Did you work when you came home?
Vicki: Before I left for Rome, I was the Respect Life director in Milwaukee. We wanted to go back to Minneapolis and it didn’t happen. So, while we were gone, I hired a student to take my job for the year.
 
So, my year in Rome was spent thinking about the brokenness of women, and I was pregnant when I came back. The student was pregnant too. She said, “I quit.” and I said, “You can’t quit—we are going to job share!” And we did. We did a joint birth announcement when the babies were born, announcing the end of our maternity leave (laughs).
 
All of this led to the start of Project Rachel. In addition to legislation and education, the bishops wanted ministry to women who had unplanned pregnancies. They understood from the beginning that women were in need of compassionate help. So, when I went to Archbishop Weakland with my ideas to help post-abortive women, he said, “I will get you the money to do this.” 

It took a couple of years to find the experts, you know, canon lawyers who could address the excommunication issue, and therapists for the grief, all of this. So we brought in priests and Catholic Charities staff for a training day.
 
Archbishop Weakland was there for the training day and told the reporters that there was a ministry. Well, there wasn’t yet. It was still more idea than reality.
 
I got a radio call at 7 a.m. the next morning – some of my kids were not even in school. I had a priest visiting from New Jersey and he was baby walking and toddler chasing and letting the dog out and the TV crews in. It was crazy. It was all over the country and abroad that day and I was suddenly an expert in a field that didn’t exist the day before.
 
Kristen: How do you walk the line so the kids don’t resent your work?
Vicki: Even when I said, “yes,” to opening the national office, I remember saying to God, “You have to be sure the kids turn out all right.”  I didn’t take phone calls at home and I didn’t travel unless babies went along. It was hard at times. When I traveled I was never gone one minute longer than I had to be...usually no more than a night or two. One of my rules was being present when they came home from school. God has been faithful to His part of the bargain. They are all lovely adults who are practicing Catholics. How blessed we are!!
 
Kristen:  There are a lot more women today who can relate to that kind of struggle.
Vicki: Yes, you know, there is research that indicates that women in stress intuitively seek out other women and their children. It’s a hormonal thing. We get oxytocin from nurturing, and women get it from the presence of other women. But, anthropologically, things have changed for women.
We used to live in systems where women had connections— like the elderly woman who was retired, or my surrogate grandmothers who thought I walked on water. We all need that somebody who isn’t family, but who acts like family.
 
Kristen: They actually calm us down!