I was seventeen. I had just graduated from high school and was looking forward to college and my eighteenth birthday. It was a summer to remember – or so I thought – one filled with dreams and hope. But little did I know that soon my life would take a dramatic turn for the worst. For it was later that summer that I had an abortion – an event that devastated me and left me with a bitterness that would haunt me for decades to come.
My memory of that event begins on a hot, muggy, June afternoon, as my sister and I were taking a walk around our neighborhood. I shared with her my fear that I might be pregnant and my concerns as to how my mother might react, were she to find out. Later that day, my sister drove me to a clinic in Wichita for a pregnancy test. The car ride home was the first of two trips I would make from that particular clinic during the hot summer of “79.
On this particular trip my sister warned me to prepare myself for trouble when I finally told my mom. She spoke at some length. But strange to say, even now I find that I cannot remember a single word she said. But I do remember the tone and the warning it contained.
What followed was not pretty. For, as my sister had foretold, my mother did not receive the news well – advising me to have an abortion, in part because the love of my life was older than me and I was technically still a minor, being a few weeks shy of eighteen. My mother quickly decided on a course of action. She informed me that I would in fact be going to college, in spite of my pregnancy. She contacted the clinic and got them to schedule an abortion for me for the next week. She told me that I was not to see my boyfriend until after the procedure was completed. She further informed me that she would drive me to the clinic. After returning home, she would call my boyfriend and tell him to drive to Wichita to bring me home.
I was to pay half of the fee and he was to pay the other half. If I did not agree to her demands, she would have him prosecuted for statutory rape.
Over the next few days, my mother spent more time with me than at any other time in my life. Sadly, this was not because she wanted to share my few moments of pregnancy with me. Rather it stemmed from a fear that, if I were to spend time with my boyfriend, we would find away to not have the abortion.
No amount of tears changed my mother’s mind. She was determined – and that was that. To make matter worse, as we were leaving town, headed for the clinic, I saw the father of my child at the corner of 1st and Meridian. The memory of seeing him like that has burned a scar on my heart that still bleeds tears.
The trip to the clinic was filled with pleading and begging. But no amount of pleading touched my mother’s heart. Arriving at the clinic, my mother signed the paperwork handed to her. As we waited for my name to be called, I tried one last time to sway her, pleading with her, “Please mom! Please don’t do this.”
The nightmare continued as my name was called and I was led to a small office half way down a long hallway. The lady behind the desk asked me if I had any questions. As the last word left her mouth, I was on my feet, running down the hallway, throwing open the big wide double waiting room doors – still pleading and begging for mercy. I fell to my knees sobbing. It was then that I felt my arms being pulled upward and I was dragged to a room where my baby was sucked away.
I lived with the consequences of this nightmare for the next thirty years – constantly waking up to the pain, the void, the anger, the depression, the loneliness, and the self-destructive impulses I experienced every day. I was convinced that everything that ever went wrong in my life was a punishment for having aborted my baby.
This continued until my priest spoke to me one day about Rachel’s Vineyard, not knowing that I myself had had an abortion many years before. Three weeks later I attended a Rachel’s Vineyard weekend.
My healing journey began that weekend – a journey I continue to make even now as I lay my nightmare at the foot of the cross each and every day, trusting in God’s mercy and the sure knowledge that I am forgiven. And I live in the certainty that Christ bore my sins upon that cross and died for me – so that I could know his peace and love and be Silent No More.