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Woman on a Mission
Breast Cancer Spawns Effort To Find Connection To Abortion
By Bethe Dufresne - TheDay.com - 5/3/2003
Charnette Messé of Groton with her daughter, Gabrielle, 4, and son, Christian, 7 months.
Photo Credit: Tim Martin / The Day
Editor's note: A year ago in March, a young Groton woman learned that she had advanced-stage breast cancer. A day later, she learned that she was pregnant. In this occasional series, The Day has followed her fight for her baby and her life.
Christian Vernon Messe, born two months premature on Sept. 9 to a mother fighting breast cancer, didn't have the smoothest start.
Today, at a healthy 14 pounds-plus, he's ready to roll.
"Sometimes he laughs so hard it makes me laugh hard," says his mother, Charnette Messé, bundling the baby up for a trip to the Lyman Allyn Art Museum in New London, where sister Gabrielle, 4, has a Friday dance class.
Much as Messé relishes laughing out loud with her robust baby boy, strain is visible in her hazel eyes, and she's never too far from tears.
"I cry a lot," says Messé, 32, whose second round at motherhood coincided not only with having to face her own mortality, but also with reconciling an abortion she had a decade ago.
With her husband, Navy physician Thomas Messé, she has lately expanded her campaign to promote breast cancer screening for younger women to include trying to prove a link between abortion and breast cancer, despite assurances from the American Cancer Society that the two appear unrelated.
Charnette Messé of Groton with her two children, Christian, front, 7 months, and Gabrielle, 4.
Photo Credit: Tim Martin / The Day
As a young woman growing up in New York, Messé danced on the Plaza at the World Trade Center, hoping a talent agent would spot her and put her on TV's "Fame." Later, as a Groton dance teacher and award-winning greeting card designer, she still yearned to step into the limelight.
She has landed there now, albeit with a heavy burden.
Along with fighting cancer and giving birth, Messé spent the last year telling her story and promoting her message, which brought her a Physician magazine cover and a stint on Oprah Winfrey's television show.
Her face and name are known to countless women who may not have realized that breast cancer can strike those in their 20s and 30s. During a February national conference for young survivors of breast cancer, she was thrilled to be recognized as a crusader.
"So many knew who I was and thanked me for what I said on 'Oprah,' " she says. "We all just bonded."
Messé is still undergoing treatment, with the drug Herceptin, after having chemotherapy and radiation following a mastectomy of her left breast.
Her latest tests showed no sign of cancer. She has her dancer's figure back, and her hair, while not grown back long enough to straighten the way she likes, is a stylish cap of curls.
Messé's greeting card business, distinguished by tiny handmade bouquets of flowers, has slowed. But she managed to get over 100 Valentine's Day cards to one of her biggest clients, Tavern on the Green in New York, and she still sells to the gift shop at Lawrence & Memorial Hospital in New London.
* * * * * *
Days before testifying last month at the Maine state legislature on anti-abortion issues, Messé is in regular Mom mode. Christian is strapped into his baby carrier while "Gabby" swirls around their home near the U.S. Naval Submarine Base in anticipation of dance class.
"I miss dancing so much," says Messé.
"At least they're both happy," she adds, watching Gabby tickle her brother into delight. "That's what matters most to me."
It's raining torrents when Messé finally gets the two children
into the family car, which bears multiple bumper stickers with somber
and reproachful messages:
"Abortion Doesn't Make You Un-Pregnant, It Makes You The Mother of A Dead Baby."
"Abortion Is Murder."
"Abortion Stops A Beating Heart."
Messé's self-examination has intensified since she began a 10-week Post-Abortion Counseling and Education course at CareNet Pregnancy Resource Center of Southeastern Connecticut. Her husband volunteers at the Groton center, which encourages women to carry to term while providing helpful resources.
Although the Messés back repeal of Roe vs. Wade, the 1973 U.S. Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion, they're now focused on trying to get legislation passed wherever possible that would mandate a different kind of abortion counseling than what's offered by organizations such as Planned Parenthood.
Charnette Messé says that when she had an abortion, prior to meeting her husband, the doctor showed her a picture of a 6- to 8-week-old fetus looking "like a dot," and told her it was a cluster of cells incapable of feeling pain. She says she was horrified years later when her husband showed her a picture of an aborted fetus.
Tom Messé wasn't as focused on fighting abortion when they met, his wife says. A Catholic priest he met on Navy duty in Korea inspired him.
Messé first told her husband about her abortion a year ago in March, during the same traumatic week she got confirmation of both advanced stage breast cancer and pregnancy. Her husband didn't put the blame on her, she says.
Meesé, who like her husband is Roman Catholic, says she's learning how to "hate the sin, not the sinner." She believes she will be reunited in heaven with all three of her children.
But she is obviously not at peace. She says she's plagued with severe headaches, which she fears could be evidence of cancer.
If women considering abortion were just shown the whole picture, says Messé, and told about the grief they could experience years later, no one would go through with it.
* * * * * *
The Messés have become widely known for their causes.
Susan Yolen, vice president for public affairs at Planned Parenthood of Connecticut headquarters in New Haven, says she often hears from colleagues in other states who ask her about "that doctor in Connecticut" who writes so many harsh anti-abortion letters to the editor.
"People who oppose abortion have their own idea of what informed consent should look like," says Yolen, adding that no legislation to mandate change has been proposed in Connecticut.
Yolen says Planned Parenthood informs anyone seeking an abortion about the medical risks. "We're careful to try and identify anybody who we think is feeling ambivalent about the decision," she says, and in that event will suggest counseling.
CareNet director Dorothy Schrage has said that occasionally she's gotten referrals from Planned Parenthood in Norwich.
Referrals do not, of course, go the other way.
Yolen says studies have shown that the most frequent reaction among women who have had an abortion is relief. "People may later develop concerns or regrets," she says, "but I generally think there are many things in life one can live to regret."
In March, says Yolen, the National Cancer Institute in Washington, D.C., invited "major players" in research to consider the body of evidence regarding abortion and breast cancer and found that "there is no connection." The group included people for and against legalized abortion, she says.
Women who for one reason or another develop breast cancer "should not have to feel guilt-ridden because of an action they took as a young woman," says Yolen.
Charnette Messé says she "pleaded" with NCI to let her testify, but was told they couldn't listen to one woman. She claims her exclusion was part of a "blatant cover-up" of evidence supporting an abortion-cancer link.
The evidence is clear, in any event, that this debate is not going away soon.
Messé says if she had suspected there might be a link between abortion and breast cancer, she would have gotten a mammogram earlier and her cancer might have been detected at a lower stage.
"Look at me," she says, sitting spread-legged on the floor downstairs at the Lyman Allyn Art Museum after Gabby's dance class while her children play close by. "My breast is gone; my ovary is gone."
Looking spent and angry, Messé admits that her doctors have always worried that her causes and public appearances could detract from her recovery.
"When are you going to rest?" she says they ask her.
Last October, as she prepared to board a flight to Chicago for the Winfrey show while battling the after-effects of chemotherapy as well as a bad cold, she said her oncologist, Richard Hellman, was urging her to stay at home.
But Messé had been trying for a long time to get on the premiere national daytime talk show, and there was no holding her back.
"Dare to Dream" was her mantra before cancer changed her life.
Now cancer has changed only the nature of her course.
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