Opening Eyes: Bronx Woman Uses Common Sense, No-nonsense and Prayer in Crisis Counseling

by John Burger, Catholic New York (April 26, 2001)

This Saturday, Hermione Susana will once again dedicate her day off to saving lives. As she has for the past three years, she'll meet with up to eight women who are considering abortion.

One at a time, Ms. Susana will try to open their eyes to what abortion is all about and convince them it's the wrong thing to do. She has experience opening eyes, including her own. In college, she was "pro choice."

She only has an hour with each woman who comes to see her at the South Bronx Pregnancy Center. But she believes that whatever information she can give is more than what most abortion clinics provide.

Ms. Susana, 29, lives and works in the borough that leads the nation in abortions. In 1999, the latest year for which statistics are available, there were more abortions than live births in the Bronx: 23,060 to 22,417. The number of babies she is able to save may be small, but she's part of one of a growing number of crisis pregnancy centers offering alternatives and hope to women who are often poor or ill-informed, or who feel they have no other option.

Many come to the Pregnancy Center, one of six branches of Expectant Mother Care (EMC) in New York City, unaware of its pro-life approach. A Yellow Pages ad promises free abortion alternatives, a pregnancy test and ultrasound.

When a woman gets to the center, at 344 E. 149th St., Ms. Susana assesses her situation, including reasons for wanting to abort. The client takes a pregnancy test and watches a video which shows a sonogram view of an unborn child and depicts an abortion which, she says, helps women understand, perhaps for the first time, just what an abortion is.

That's an important step for many who come to the center. Most have no idea what effects abortion has on a woman, Ms. Susana said. Nor are they familiar with the basic facts about the development of an unborn child, she added.

Much of what Ms. Susana does involves referrals and other help for problems a woman sees as standing in the way of having the baby, such as not being able to stay in school or keep a scholarship or getting out of an abusive relationship.

"She has nothing to hold onto, no family attachments, just this man who tells her what to do," Ms. Susana explained.

She added that many of the women she sees are determined to have an abortion, and it can take a lot of persuasion - and prayer - to change their minds. But some have gone beyond saving their babies and have gotten their lives back in order and turned to God, she said.

Ms. Susana's own conversion began with science, not religion, since she wasn't a practicing Catholic in college. Using common sense, she found she could not reconcile the accepted wisdom of the pro-abortion movement with what she was learning about animal development.

Born in the Bronx, she attended Holy Spirit School there before moving to Haiti at age 9 where she lived for four year's with her mother's best friend. "I came away with a deeper understanding of people - that we're all alike," she said. "Their faith is solid," she said of the Haitians. "They really believe that God will provide, even if they have nothing."

After graduating from A. Philip Randolph High School in Harlem, she majored in information sciences at Hartwick College in Oneonta. In a biology class there, she was struck by the stages of development of a chick egg, and, in doing a project on gender selection, was bothered by the thought that parents might abort a child if its sex isn't what they want.

These thoughts came back to her years later when a friend invited her to attend a prayer rally outside a Bronx abortion clinic. She was bothered seeing both the young women going in and the graphic posters of aborted babies held up by some protesters - signs that reminded her of her biology class.

Next, her friend invited her to visit the South Bronx Pregnancy Center, where she met its director, Ishmael Rodriguez, who confided to her that he'd been praying for an African-American woman to volunteer at the center, where many clients are African-American and Hispanic.

She accepted the invitation, in part because of her emerging feelings against abortion and also to fulfill a requirement for apostolic work as a member of the Legion of Mary at Our Lady of Mercy parish in the Bronx.

What credentials does she have counsel women? "Guts," she responds immediately, adding that all counselors are trained by EMC and that prayer is "extremely important", too.

At her parish, St. Nicholas of Tolentine, Ms. Susana teaches teens in the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults, 10 of whom were received into the Church at Easter.

"Kids are going through a lot of struggles, and she's there for them," said Gregoria Gomez, director of religious education at Tolentine.

But Ms. Susana is not satisfied with simply bringing more teens in. "The Church should strive to have holy kids in our churches," she said. "We have to challenge the falsehoods they hear" in popular music, television and movies. "We lie to them when we don't give them credit" that they can live chastely in accordance with the Sixth Commandment.

As her day job, Ms. Susana is a career instructor at the Marie Smith Urban Street Academy, a division of Pius XII Youth and Family Services in the Bronx. It offers alternative educational programs to help motivated young adults develop skills needed in the workplace. It's also a place she can send expectant mothers who need help getting their lives together.

She says that her work with young people gives her insight into the problems youth are having. Influenced by popular culture, especially sex-saturated television, movies and music, more young people are sexually active. They're looking for love and becoming romantically attached but tend to be overly romantic and impractical when it comes to relationships, she said. "They end up in the same situation over and over again."

Fifteen-year-olds seeking abortion will tell her they're "too young to become parents." But Ms. Susana tells them, "Yeah, but you made an adult decision; you did something that you know could give you a child."

They respond in a blasé manner, "Yeah? So?"

But Ms. Susana keeps her faith. For young people, she's straight-speaking yet always there to listen, trying to get to the root of the problem. And for those who walk away from her advice, she prays.

"I have trust that God will catch them," she said.