Wife, Mother, Grandmother…and Pro-Life Prisoner

A personal reflection by the husband of Joan Andrews Bell, a 75-year-old woman jailed for over two years for trying to save a baby's life.

From Crisis

By Christopher Bell

The husband of pro-life heroine Joan Andrews Bell reflects on the past year of Joan’s incarceration for peacefully trying to stop a late-term abortionist.

“My precious” is not what I call my wedding ring, but it has become especially redolent since my wife Joan was incarcerated a year ago. 

Her peaceful, prayerful effort to stop a late-term abortionist in Washington, D.C., garnered her and nine others unjust condemnations and prosecutions from the Biden-Harris Department of Justice. On the feast of Our Lady of Sorrows last year, Friday, September 15th, Joan was immediately taken from the courtroom where a jury (a majority of whom admitted during the selection process to financially supporting abortion groups or actively protested against the Supreme Court’s recent overruling of Roe v. Wade) declared her and her friends guilty of trying to stop abortion. 

We were unable to physically see each other, except for another brief appearance in court for her sentencing, for nine months. However, we were able to speak by phone 20 minutes at a time. An occasional hazy video chat, that sounded underwater, was permitted on a limited basis. Modern-day families are so hectic this may seem ideal to have a focused 20-minute talk. She could tell me all sorts of things to do and then hang up. 

Before Christ was born, Sextus Propertius from Assisi penned, “Semper in absentes felicior aestus amantes” which we recall frequently as “Absence makes the heart grow fonder.”  I can say this has never been truer for me. 

Joan and I knew from before exchanging wedding rings that trying to do everything moral to stop an abortion would entail sacrifice. I’m not trying to be sanctimonious about Jesus’ exhortation that some demons are only cast out with much prayer and fasting, but we do believe Him. We must pick up our cross if that is what He’s asking us to do.

“And what little sacrifice this is,” Joan said last month. We’re now able to visit occasionally, surrounded by guards who also watch other inmates and guests. “They aren’t torturing us. We get to eat. We get medicines. In Germany, the Nazi’s would shoot you and your whole family if you were hiding a Jewish person. Why are some pro-lifers so upset that we try to save a few lives.”

She often has said she’s not in a prison in Cuba, China, or Iran. American prisons aren’t like that. 

How easy it is to laugh with Joan, even in her bright yellow prison suit. (Yellow is the new black here in the Federal Detention Center, Philadelphia.) 

At our first meeting, 36 years ago, she was in prison. On some subconscious level, I must have recalled the awe in seeing her with a smile, surrounded as we were in a room no bigger than a large living room with other prisoners and visitors and guards. Her happy face wasn’t just for meeting a new friend; her spirit reflected her deeper desire to do what God wants. To try to help a helpless human being. And if you try to save a baby by sitting in front of the door of an abortionist’s office, are taken away by police, condemned by the court, and put in jail, the Lord knows you did what you could. 

If a mother is turned away from the abortion, we know she will never regret having her baby. Even if no mother was ever turned away, even if all the babies were killed later, on some level beyond words, those children, and even those mothers, know that someone was willing to give up her life, or some part of her life, to save them. 

For the mother who later regrets her abortion, she may have someone in prison who prayed for her to help her receive the grace she needed to find God’s infinite mercy. The women in prison who’ve had abortions—or just believe it’s right—also find a new mercy and forgiveness. The witness for life truly redounds, even in the cold corners of incarceration.

My wife’s ability to love everyone—the murderer, the thief, the drug dealer, those who were framed, those who copped a plea even though they were innocent—shows me how much love God gives to those willing to give a little more. Yet I don’t deserve the wedding ring she gave me. She’s way too good. For all my sins and shortcomings, I deserve the jail cell. She doesn’t. 
She smiles, and I feel forgiveness. 

My own prayer time is filled with a presence that she is with me.

How mysterious to reflect on Humanae Vitae, as Pope Paul VI wrote, “husband and wife, through that mutual gift of themselves, which is specific and exclusive to them alone, develop that union of two persons in which they perfect one another, cooperating with God.”  

I don’t know if I’m perfecting her, and I’m not even sure she’s perfecting me; but, certainly, I’m better because of her—especially right now, even in this painful separation. 

I recently learned that Pope John XXIII stated: 

in order to encourage conjugal love and fidelity, especially in these times when the natural and divine rights of married life are the object of such frequent and such disgraceful attacks [this was written November 23, 1959]…[granted] Married couples who on piously kissing the wife’s wedding ring either separately or both together, devoutly recite with at least a contrite heart the invocation: “Grant us, Lord, that loving Thee we may love each other and live according to Thy holy law,” or another similar invocation, can gain a partial Indulgence . . . once on their wedding day.  

Well, I took this news to my wife on our next phone call and declared with all the authority vested in me as the head of our spiritual home, “We can kiss our wedding rings and gain grace!”

I kiss the ring after Holy Communion especially for her. She was a daily communicant and now hasn’t seen a Catholic priest for four months; now she is making a daily Spiritual Communion. Prisons aren’t equipped with proper medical support much less spiritual support. 

I feel like Bassanio in The Merchant of Venice, who received a ring from his beloved Portia as she said, 

I give them with this ring, 
Which, when you part from, lose, or give away, Let it presage the ruin of your love, 
And be my vantage to exclaim on you. 

And his response, 

Madam, you have bereft me of all words. . . But when this ring Parts from this finger, then parts life from hence. O, then be bold to say Bassanio’s dead!

Like the ancient Egyptians, who are believed to be the first to have exchanged wedding rings, Joan requested that ours have an inscription. Simple. Unique. Personal.

While pagans saw the ring as a symbol of infinity, eternity, and endless cycles of life, a gateway to unknown worlds, we see an attachment of love from the heart of each other to the endless, true love of God alone. 

When together, with guards watching, we exchange kisses of each other’s ring.  

The hope that a newly-elected President Trump would pardon her and all her friends, as he has said he would at least twice on the campaign trail since her trial, is good news. But the best news is small victories of another baby saved, another mother helped, another man and woman coming back to life and finding healing after an abortion. Daily, these victories are won—they’re just not in the headlines. 

Deceitful Democrats claim there have been more abortions since Roe v. Wade fell, but the number of births in pro-life states increases. The number of men and women voicing that abortion was against their beliefs is growing louder. Even IVF is coming under greater criticism for the first time in 40 years—as the incredible number of children who are conceived and then killed or frozen indefinitely are being brought to the public’s attention. These are little stars during these dark times; but as we know, those little stars are often larger than our own sun.

As Frodo mourned his dark times, “I wish it need not have happened in my time,” the wise Gandalf responded, “So do I and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”

Joan just called. She reminded me of what I hadn’t done for her (helping some of her new friends and mailing an article she requested). Then she added a few more items for my list. Time was then up. 

All we have to decide is what to do with the time given us. 

Maybe this is what Paul’s words to the Colossians (1:24) meant: “Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and I fill up in my flesh what is lacking in Christ’s sufferings for the sake of His body, the Church.”

Putting all this into this simple ring, I say again tonight, alone, “Joan, receive this ring as a sign of my love and fidelity, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.”

Pictured: Joan Andrews Bell, Prisoner of Conscience, Federal Detention Center, Philadelphia.