Oprah Winfrey: I told my dying mother 'thank you' for choosing life
Oprah Winfrey’s mother, Vernita Lee, passed away this year on Thanksgiving Day. She was 83. Oprah shared with People about the final moments she spent with her mother, a time she called “sacred” and “blessed.”
Winfrey said of the experience, “This is the beauty of my life. There’s not a thing that happens to me, that I don’t look at it as a teaching, learning, experience. I knew my mother was dying. I got a call from my sister (Patricia, whom Lee placed for adoption in 1963) that she thought it was the end.” Winfrey changed her work plans to make a surprise visit to her mother.
Trying to find the right words to say, she asked herself, “‘What is a way I can have this conversation about the end? How do I close it?’ I just thought, ‘What is the truth for me? What is it that I need to say?’”
What she was finally able to say to her mother was profound. Winfrey explained to People:
What I said was, “Thank you. Thank you, because I know it’s been hard for you. It was hard for you as a young girl having a baby, in Mississippi. No education. No training. No skills. Seventeen, you get pregnant with this baby. Lots of people would have told you to give that baby away. Lots of people would’ve told you to abort that baby. You didn’t do that. I know that was hard.
I want you to know that no matter what, I know that you always did the best you knew how to do. And look how it turned out."
Despite Oprah’s own survival story, she has promoted the Shout Your Abortion movement relentlessly in her O Magazine. This pro-abortion movement doesn’t give women the full story on the damage that abortion can do, nor does it promote the beauty and hope of adoption. Instead, it gloats about abortion and promotes the ending of a human life as something merely to be celebrated and encouraged.
Winfrey says after the experience she feels “complete.” She told People, “I would say to anybody—and if you live long enough, everybody goes through it—say the things that you need to say while the people are still alive, so that you are not one of those people living with regret about what you would’ve, should’ve, could’ve said.”
Oprah, if you’re glad you weren’t aborted, why do you support the abortion of other babies? If you are grateful for the gift of life, why do you advocate for the destruction of human life?