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January 25, 2024By Tanya Connor | The Catholic Free Press
Life in the womb, described with wonder by a developing baby and illustrated with Scripture and watercolor paintings, is the subject of a book started years ago.
Prayers, experiences and ministry helped form this work titled, In My Mother’s Womb, published by Our Sunday Visitor last November.
One of the authors is Christine Schroeder, a member of Immaculate Heart of Mary Parish in Winchendon. When she and her husband, Stephen, belonged to St. Patrick Parish in Jaffrey, New Hampshire, where the book took shape, they had connections in the Worcester Diocese, as did other authors Mary Roma and Susan J. Bellavance.
Another author is Father Bill Deschamps, 81, pastor of St. Patrick’s and Sacred Heart of Jesus Parish in Greenville, New Hampshire. At his birth, he and his mother nearly died, he said. She had one other living child and lost five to miscarriage. After 20 years in the United States Air Force and getting involved in church activities, he became a priest.
“God has a plan for all of us,” he said. “It starts at conception.”
The book is dedicated to “the Mother of Jesus” and “those whose babies did not reach full term.” It says, “We offer this hope of faith – that every child has an eternal soul and will be restored to us in eternity.”
The story, initially called “Diary of a Little Soul,” grew out of St. Patrick’s respect life committee, and was shared week by week at Masses and in the Sunday bulletin for several years before being published as a book. It describes fetal development from the unborn baby’s perspective.
“I am smaller than a mustard seed, but everything that makes me a person is already here,” the baby says in Week 3 in the book. The baby continues: “Today is Oct. 2, the feast of the guardian angels, and my guardian angel is right here with me. How God loves me!”
The authors explained how the story came to be.
About 13 years ago “we were forming a new respect life committee” under Father Deschamps’ leadership, Mrs. Schroeder said. Parishioners were invited to “spiritually adopt” unborn children they didn’t know by praying for them daily for nine months, then bringing in gifts for a crisis pregnancy center.
The website spiritualadoption.org suggests this prayer by Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen: “Jesus, Mary and Joseph, I love you very much. I beg you to spare the life of ... the unborn baby that I have spiritually adopted who is in danger of abortion.”
To help parishioners get a better idea of the development of the babies they were praying for, committee members spent some of their personal prayer time writing about fetal development, preparing information to eventually share with the parish.
“We wanted to draw attention to [the fact that] every stage of life is sacred,” explained Mrs. Roma. She recalled reading The Catholic Free Press as a youth when visiting her grandmother in Spencer. Later, she taught first and second grade and special education students in New York, so she liked “the creative part” of imagining what the baby would say in the diary.
“For me it was also a healing experience,” said Mrs. Roma, who’d had a stillborn son. “I started to see God still loved him.” She hoped the diary would help others who lose children, besides saving babies from abortion.
Mrs. Schroeder, a former childbirth educator and midwife’s assistant, had pregnancy and fetal development resources. She said she sometimes prayed and wrote at eucharistic adoration at St. John, Guardian of Our Lady Parish in Clinton after dropping her children off at Trivium School in Lancaster.
Her pro-life mother “stayed on top” of what was happening before abortion was legalized throughout the United States. As a high school student, Mrs. Schroeder knew girls who went to New York City for abortions, while she volunteered with children with Down syndrome.
“You realize how precious each life is ... deserving to be cherished and respected just like everybody else,” she said.
She got her bachelor’s degree in elementary and special education, married, raised five children and worked with disabled people.
“We were all busy mothers, and we didn’t get very far” in writing the baby’s diary, Mrs. Schroeder said of herself, Mrs. Roma, and Gizelle Grover, who helped briefly.
Father Deschamps said he told them, “We’re going to go up in the [rectory] chapel,” to write while adoring Jesus. “It’s his work.”
In October 2012, when there were about nine entries ready, he said he read them weekly at Masses and printed them in the parish bulletin.
“You could hear them chuckling,” he said of worshippers’ responses, such as when the baby describes his dance-like movement as the “Womba.”
“What’s next?” the congregation asked.
“We haven’t finished it yet,” Father Deschamps replied. He said they finished the story in 2013 for Father’s Day.
“I said, ‘We should put this in a book,’” he recalled.
Mrs. Bellavance, of St. Patrick Parish in Newport, New Hampshire, whose children went to Trivium School with the Schroe-ders, said she helped make the diary accessible online to other parishes. A Catholic children’s book author who did vocational discernment with Mother Teresa and her sisters, Mrs. Bellavance connected diary authors with Our Sunday Visitor, which published another of her books.
OSV hired illustrator Dan Andreasen for the watercolors and pen and ink drawings, she said.
She did a professional re-write and added the two weeks before conception and more Scripture passages.
“We wanted to give a personhood to the unborn” children, and help readers love them, she explained. With abortion, “you’re killing a human being with all the possibilities of life.”
With an election that will include talk about abortion, the book is timely, Mrs. Schroeder said, but “we didn’t use it as a method of preaching, just to celebrate life, the magnificence of what’s happening in the womb.”
She said she and her husband planned to present the book to Visitation House in Worcester, which houses pregnant women and their babies, and she will probably bring a book to the 40 Days for Life campaign to end abortion.
– Editor’s note: The book can be ordered from Our Sunday Visitor online at osvcatholicbookstore.com/Search?q=T2699 or by
calling 800-348-2440 Ext. 1, Ext. 3.
