One of the last things Oprah Winfrey did before her mother died this fall was to thank her for choosing life.
The celebrity’s mother, Vernita Lee, 83, died on Thanksgiving Day.
Winfrey is not pro-life. She promotes pro-abortion campaigns and politicians through her media empire. But she did see the value of her mother’s difficult decision to choose life for her as a young teenager.
In a new interview with People Magazine, Winfrey described her last moments with her mother and her struggles to communicate what she was really feeling.
A few days before Lee died, Winfrey said she canceled all her meetings and traveled to Milwaukee to be with her.
“I waited for a way to say what I wanted to say,” she said. “I couldn’t find it that day. The next morning I woke up, and I was actually praying for, ‘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?’”
Eventually, Winfrey did figure out what she wanted to say: Thank you.
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According to the report:
She recalls, “I played another one of her favorite artists, Joshua Nelson, singing ‘How I Got Over.’ I could see that it opened her a little bit, because my mother’s been a very closed down person. I could see that the music gave me an opening to say what I needed to say.”
“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.’”
Lee gave birth to Oprah when she was 18 and living in Mississippi, according to the report. She struggled with poverty throughout her life, working as a maid and trying to raise three children. She made an adoption plan for her fourth child, Patricia, a half-sibling that Oprah did not even know she had until adulthood.
Later, Lee told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that she never told Oprah about her half sister because she was ashamed of the adoption. Lee said she was not able to take care of Patricia herself.
“I thought it was a terrible thing for me to do,” Lee said.
But as Winfrey pointed out in her final good-bye to her mother, it was not terrible at all. Lee chose life for her and her half-sister. Those were difficult decisions, but they were courageous ones because Lee gave her daughters a chance at life. She did not take what some would consider the easy way out and have an abortion. That truly would have been a “terrible thing,” but Lee chose the better, more difficult path because she knew her daughters’ lives were valuable.
Sadly, Winfrey has not promoted this type of courage lately. Instead, her magazine recently featured the “Shout Your Abortion” campaign, a pro-abortion movement where women brag about how wonderful it was to abort their unborn babies. Winfrey also campaigned for pro-abortion candidates this fall. In doing so, she seemed to forget how her mother was one of those women in difficult circumstances and she one of those unborn babies who could have been aborted.
