Editor's Note: This is an article to do with post-abortion women and regret. Resources for healing can be accessed through Silent No More, Option Line, and Project Rachel.
You've surely heard of Gwen Berry and Sha'Carri Richardson, the former who is an activist Olympian and the latter who will not be on the USA Olympics team because of a failed drug test due to marijuana. There's also Brianna McNeal, though, whose story is told in Juliet Macur's "An Abortion, a Missed Drug Test and Altered Records Add Up to Trouble" for The New York Times, hardly a pro-life outlet. That being said, the subheadline still noted McNeal "was traumatized after having an abortion."
As Macur reported:
Last month, McNeal, 29, was suspended for five years for “tampering within the results management process” in connection with her missing a doping test two days after she had the abortion. McNeal said she was in bed recovering from the procedure and did not hear the antidoping official arrive at the front door of her home in Northridge, Calif.
In a decision released on Friday, the Court of Arbitration for Sport in Switzerland upheld her five-year ban, meaning that McNeal will not have the chance to defend her Olympic title and will miss the next two Summer Games. The court said it would render a detailed decision later. It also added yet another penalty to her ban: McNeal is now disqualified from all events from Feb. 13, 2020 to Aug. 14, 2020, and should give up all medals, prizes and money won during that time.
Gabbi Cunningham, who finished fourth in the 100 hurdles at the U.S. trials, will take McNeal’s place in Tokyo.
The details are a bit more nuanced, as it wasn't one mere testing concern:
The five-year suspension followed a yearlong ban McNeal received four years ago for missing three tests in a 12-month period. In that case, she said she twice forgot to update her whereabouts in the system that tracks athletes for random testing. On a third occasion, she said, she made a mistake entering the time when she would be available.
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McNeal has not been accused of doping. Several flaws in the documentation she submitted to prove that she had an abortion are the reason for her ban.
Citing privacy reasons, McNeal asked for a doctor's note regarding what was an unnamed medical procedure, though she got the dates wrong. "World Athletics argued in a disciplinary hearing that McNeal should have known better than to alter the notes without confirming the date of the procedure with the clinic," Macur wrote.
McNeal is, understandably, emotional about the situation:
“Right now I feel excommunicated from the sport itself and stigmatized, and to me it is unfair,” McNeal said in a video call before her appeal was denied. “I just don’t believe that this warranted a suspension at all, much less a five-year suspension, for just a technicality, an honest mistake during a very emotional time.”
Of the sport’s antidoping authorities, she added: “They say that they are protecting athletes that are clean, but I don’t feel protected at all. I just feel like I’m being judged for this very big decision I made that really affected my life.”
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McNeal said she was coming forward to discuss the abortion now because she wanted people to know that the current suspension did not involve anything like tampering with a urine sample. She said she is “not doping and will never dope.”
In fact, the post-abortion confusion and regret is heartbreaking:
In its case against her, McNeal said, World Athletics said it didn’t believe she was so traumatized by the abortion that she got the date of the procedure wrong. After all, the organization said, she continued to post on social media and compete in the weeks afterward.
McNeal said investigators had chastised her for seeing a spiritual adviser instead of a psychiatrist while she was suffering from depression after the abortion.
“I told them, ‘Oh, really? For me, growing up in the Black community, that’s how we cope with everything — we go to church and we talk to our pastor or spiritual adviser,” she said. “I just feel like they have not been compassionate at all.”
McNeal said that as a Christian, she felt guilt about the abortion, which she underwent so she could compete in the 2020 Games. She said she was even more crushed when the Games were postponed until 2021, because the delay meant she could have had the baby after all.
McNeal had been so shaken and disoriented by the abortion, she said, that it didn’t occur to her that changing the date would be a bad thing.
There is a lot to unpack from this very raw piece. Despite how not only the NYT is not only not pro-life, but often hostile to the pro-life movement, there is some real emotion expressed here about the nature of abortion, its psychological effects, and post-abortion regret.
If the reasons given for the abortion are true, then it was indeed an elective procedure. It's even more heartbreaking, though, that the reason turned out to not even come to fruition. The abortion, then, which ended the life of McNeal's unborn child, was ultimately for nothing.
What happened to McNeal is further proof that something needs to change within our culture and how we respect life when it comes to looking after pregnant women, their children, and providing healing and forgiveness for women experiencing post-abortion regret.
As I have written about in another VIP piece, mothers have been rail loaded, from being initially denied access to breastfeeding their newborns in the name of COVID restrictions, to companies like Nike wanting women who had just given birth to rush back into sports, and then pay them less.
This morning, Tom Joyce wrote an opinion piece for The Washington Examiner about how "The Olympics COVID restrictions are anti-family."
Regardless as to if the Olympic Games had happened not, though, being pregnant and having a baby need not have been an impediment to success.
Other testimonies prove as much.
A February 2018 article from Madison Medeiros for She Knows highlights "14 Incredible Olympic Athletes Who Competed While Pregnant."
The Olympics.com website features a short video of "Athletes who won Olympic medals whilst pregnant."
Further, the "Human Interest" section of Live Action News is full of success stories of pregnant mothers and what they were able to achieve in addition to, not in spite of, choosing life for their children.
One of those stories is of Lindsay Flach, the 31-year old who is 18-weeks pregnant and competed in track and field Olympic trials.
Another is of mother Makenna Myler, who qualified for the Olympic trials last month by running a 32-minute 10k.
Ultimately, there is hope for McNeal, as well as for other women who may be abortion-minded or post-abortive. As mentioned above, resources for healing can be accessed through Silent No More, Option Line, and Project Rachel.
