God protected me from having an abortion. He gave me an awareness of the value of life.
However, I did suffer because of abortion. When I was a teenager, my mother asked me to go with her to an abortion clinic. This was in Cuba where abortion was very, very common. And the same doctor that we saw at the clinic had a private office where they did abortions, even though abortion-on-demand was not legal in Cuba at that time. I begged my mother not to abort that child. I did everything that I could. I said to her, “I will raise it, mom!” And I was only a teenager. “I will raise it; I will take care of it for you.” And she smiled and she said, “What would people think? Look how old you are already.”
And I remember sitting in that clinic, inside, and waiting for her to finish and just wondering what I could’ve done more. I was not a Christian. I didn’t have any pictures to show her. I didn’t really know how bad abortion was. In my heart I felt that it was something bad, but I never really knew until I saw the pictures. And I never really knew for many years how much anger I had inside of me against my mother. It took years. We were never close after that.
I attempted suicide shortly after that. And most of my life, I felt that I really had to be the best at everything, because I really had to make it worthwhile that she allowed me to be born. I later found out that she had aborted other children. And every time we sat at the dinner table, I would look and think about those that were not there. There’s tremendous pain when you’re a sibling and your mother aborts. And I’m sure that there are many people out there that are feeling this pain. I gave my testimony to a group of people last night, and several people came up to me and said something similar.
I got involved in the pro-life movement and I have been in it for over thirty years. And when I first saw the abortion pictures, the one about the D&C—that the D&C baby comes out in pieces—that’s the type of abortion that’s done in Cuba. And a voice, an internal voice, said to me, “That’s what your brother looked like when he was aborted.” And I wrote a letter to my brother that I have not met, that I will meet in heaven.
Brothers and sisters, abortion hurts. For years I went through post-abortion syndrome. I didn’t know that you could go through post-abortion syndrome if you haven’t had an abortion yourself, but I did.
I have a type of cancer that is very deadly. And my sister lives in Fort Myers, my brother lives somewhere else. I would’ve had a brother or sister to help me through this difficult time that I’m going through. And I lost most of my family to abortion. My mother had eight abortions. And my mother realized what she had done when she saw one of my presentations. It was a great pain for me to have her present. I never told her how bad it was, but she came to one of my presentations and she saw what abortion is, and she used to say to me, “If only I had known! I love all my children. If only someone had told me. If only I had known.” Till the day she died, she regretted her abortions.
God bless you.
To watch Magaly's video story from the 2006 March for Life, click here.