Mary Ann Schwab, dyed-red hair showing gray at the roots, rides the brake as she guides her car past the graves of baseball hero Joe DiMaggio, California’s 32nd governor, Edmund “Pat” Brown, a mayor, a banking entrepreneur and more than a century of the Bay Area’s Catholic dead.

Next to the old mausoleum at Holy Cross Catholic Cemetery in Colma, Schwab parks the car by a grassy knoll. Her scarf and bright blue coat billowing in the wind, Schwab, who is well into her 80s, walks over to a white stone statue of a grieving woman on her knees inscribed “Rachel Mourning.”

Here, below the lawn, are perhaps hundreds of fetuses, mostly from miscarriages, sent by Catholic hospitals to be buried here. The statue, named after a woman in the Bible who mourned her dead children, was built a decade ago to commemorate these lost lives.

But Rachel has become a nationwide symbol for another kind of loss – the emotional impact of abortion. Project Rachel, a national Catholic post-abortion hotline, was founded for women who want to grieve their abortions.

Schwab is the voice behind the Bay Area’s Project Rachel hotline, a program with the Archdiocese of San Francisco. Day or night, people who want to talk about abortion can call Schwab to be referred to a priest or therapist. Or just to talk.

“These are people in pain, they’ve carried this burden with them,” Schwab said. “I direct them to someone who can help relieve their burden.”

The divisive debate over whether abortion should be legal is not new. But today, a growing number of pro-life and pro-choice groups are launching programs to help women and men talk about their experiences in the aftermath.The project is very personal for Schwab.

Schwab has never had an abortion, but she’s lost three of her five children. One son died as an infant, and her daughter died when she was 4 years old, both from a congenital disease. Another son died in a construction accident in his 20s.

For Schwab, regardless of how a child is lost, the grief is the same.

The hotline number on the Project Rachel pamphlet is Schwab’s cell phone. She receives an average of 20 calls every month. Half of those are men, many of whom call out of guilt for convincing girlfriends to have abortions. Callers are as young as 18 or older than Schwab. Nearly all are Catholic.

“She calls me at 9 o’clock at night, she’s available 24/7 to this ministry,” said Ellen Kelly, a career counselor at the University of San Francisco who has volunteered for the program since 2002.

The program, founded in 1984 by a Catholic activist in Wisconsin, works like the 12 steps of Alcoholics Anonymous, Schwab said. She trains mentors to guide women to accept guilt, forgive people they blame for the abortion, forgive themselves and ask God for forgiveness. In the last step, women name the child.

Schwab’s activism grew out of a long career with the Catholic Church. She was raised in a Catholic home in a Catholic community in Kansas City, Mo.

“My faith was never challenged,” she said.

After receiving a master’s degree in social work at St. Louis University, she had job offers from Catholic groups across the country. The farthest-flung offer was from a priest in San Francisco who sent her $200 and told Schwab to buy a train ticket if she wanted a job with Catholic Charities, a nonprofit agency of the archdiocese. Schwab’s mother convinced her to take the offer.

“She was more adventurous than I,” Schwab said.

Schwab has worked or volunteered with the church since. She founded the archdiocese’s Respect Life program after Roe v. Wade passed in 1973 and opened its chapter of Project Rachel in the early 1990s.

“This is the way you see the hand of the Lord operating because, and I’m sure this happens to many other people, that what they do is a result of where they are at the time they’re called to do it,” Schwab said. “It could be evaluated as accidental, but you have to see the mind of God behind it all.”

Schwab’s car bursts at the seams with boxes of pamphlets on post-abortion syndrome, large foam-core posters, plastic bags filled with fliers, church music and discarded coffee cups. She won’t drive more than 35 mph, even in the left lane of Interstate 280 if that’s the route she must take.

At a memorial mass the archdiocese held at the Rachel Mourning shrine in September, Kelly pointed Schwab out to her boyfriend.

“I told him, ‘She’s a little flighty, she’s old, but it’s amazing what she does for people,’” Kelly said.

For Schwab, the Project Rachel concept is simple: it’s OK to believe you did something wrong. And it’s OK to have done something wrong.

This sentiment is exactly what Nancy Rogers had been looking for.

Rogers, 47, had two abortions, both more than 20 years ago. Immediately after her second abortion she became depressed.

“I had bought the culture’s thing that, well, you don’t want to be pregnant, have an abortion, and life goes on,” she said. “It went on, but very painfully.”

No amount of counseling helped, and her depression lasted for decades – until she called Schwab. She was referred to a mentor who helped her admit she believed she committed a sin and then forgive herself.

“One of the things with knowing Christ, whether it’s an abortion or whatever the wrong may be, is that God does want us to acknowledge it, grow from it, and turn it into something good,” Rogers said.

Pro-choice groups traditionally have been reluctant to address the emotional impact abortions may have on women. But now groups are springing up to counter religious programs such as Project Rachel.

“In my own personal experience of having an abortion, I wasn’t offered any support from my abortion provider,” said Aspen Baker, founder and executive director of Exhale, an Oakland-based, pro-choice, post-abortion counseling hotline. “I did find groups like Project Rachel, but I wasn’t looking for counseling from a religious perspective. I wanted to get a chance to talk about what it was like for me.”

Perhaps the most controversial step of Project Rachel is to name the unborn children – which requires the mother to identify the baby’s sex. Many, including Schwab, say this is intuitive knowledge by the mother.

“In the healing process as you've begun to except the fact that you did have a child, you drop the barriers of self-recrimination, dropped the barriers of hostility toward the people who you felt were responsible,” she said. “You go into a serene state in which you can think about the reality of the child.”

Standing before the Rachel statue, Schwab talks about the mass held here for miscarried and aborted babies. Parents wrote the names of their children on leaves and buried them at the base of a nearby tree.

Just down the road from where she stands is one gravestone marking where her first two children are buried.

“People are realizing that this is their child and their child forever,’’ she said, “even though they’ve never seen it.”

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