I had an abortion because I was nervous about being pregnant at seventeen, single, and because my boyfriend wanted me to have one. When I went to Planned Parenthood, the worker there told me that I wouldn’t be aborting a baby, because it was nothing more than a blob of cells with no shape or form. She then told me that it wasn’t worth disappointing my parents over this because I would have to forget about school if I decided not to have an abortion. I decided at that moment to schedule an appointment for an abortion. Back in 1975, it was against the law for a minor to get an abortion without parental consent. The woman from Planned Parenthood told me that since I was only seventeen years old, I would need to bring a legal ID from someone of legal age, and not to tell my parents, because they could have stopped me from having one.
As time went on after the abortion, I felt like I had try and hide my shame over this. There were physical aspects from the abortion that were bothersome, but nothing like the guilt and shame I felt. The shame from having an abortion, and the guilt for both the abortion, and the lies I had to tell in order to be able to get the abortion
A few years later, a friend of mine brought me to the Lord, and I had accepted Christ as my Savior. Little by little, I had begun to see that abortion is murder. It was at this point that the guilt and the shame were the worst ever. By now, I had seen pictures of what happens to a baby in the womb when an abortion is done. It is gruesome and heinous. The electric chair is more humane. Years later, thoughts of that day and procedure kept coming back to me – over and over again. I realized that I had done the most awful thing I could ever do, and in the most inhumane way – I paid someone to kill my unborn baby. I could see it happening. I would see the doctor doing things inside of me to my baby in order to kill it. After that, I felt that I should suffer, and that it should hurt. I felt cheap, and unworthy. After all, I used sex for recreation. I used abortion as birth control. Even though I didn’t think that I was worthy of God’s forgiveness for this, the pain was too much, and I decided to go to Him, anyway. God’s love and forgiveness came, and after a while, the images stopped. A friend of mine who went through something similar, told me about a post-abortion recovery program at Rachel’s Vineyard, which I found helpful and healing. But the best was yet to come. When God forgave me, he turned the situation around into something good. I started to get involved with Pro-Life groups, and went to rallies, protests, and even had my testimony taped to play on a show called Faces of Abortion. I realized that my shame and guilt were now gone, after all these years.
Abortion is America’s holocaust. Roe v. Wade is the worst U.S. Supreme Court decision since the Dred Scott decision. Silence equals acceptance. An unborn baby is a living, human being, and deserves to be nurtured, and treated as such. The intimidation tactics by Planned Parenthood to get me to have an abortion, the abortion procedure, and the physical and emotional aftermath are too painful for any woman to have to deal with. This is why I am silent no more.