Our first Prime Minister, Sir John A. MacDonald said, "Abortion saps the life blood of a Nation."
I am watching as abortion is doing just that. Free speech and conscience rights are being suppressed. In 2017, 4,000 Canadian women swallowed abortion pills, and in six provinces they were paid for by the government. The media gleefully reports on increasing “access” to abortion.
Abortion is changing us as a nation. But abortion is also a deeply personal nightmare, and it has changed so many of us, one by one by one. Abortion changed me.
As a 15 year old, I went to a party and emerged as a date-rape victim and a mother carrying a child. When I boarded a bus back home after an abortion in upstate New York, I had changed again.
I knew I did not want an abortion but I believed it was my only choice. I knew the doctor was lying when he said it wouldn’t hurt, and that it wouldn’t take long. It was painful beyond anything I had ever experienced. I wept uncontrollably as I watched the jar by my right foot filling up with blood. I wondered, too late, where my child and her soul would go once the instruments were finished with us.
And while the doctor was correct that the procedure was quick, the emotional damage it inflicted took decades to repair.
I could not find my way back to the girl I was before. I chose self hatred and denial as the way forward. I masked the pain of my child’s death through drugs and promiscuity.
I shut down my maternal instincts, rejected my ability to nurture life, to give birth. I became an advocate for abortion. I plummeted into depression and thought about suicide.
After I got married, I became a workaholic, living on coffee and two packs of cigarettes a day. Malnutrition and a complete breakdown followed.
Fourteen years after the abortion, I suffered an ectopic pregnancy that ended the life of my son, Joseph Michael. Grieving him gave me permission to face the truth. The death by abortion of my first child was absolutely, morally, and objectively wrong. I named her Sarah Elizabeth, and I wept for her. Honesty brought me relief from the years of suffering. The inner conflict came to an end. I finally grieved her loss.
I asked forgiveness from God, my child and others. Healing happened when I accepted forgiveness and no longer held my transgression against myself. But the shockwaves that followed my abortion continue to reach me. I never conceived another child. I have no grandchildren.
I vowed years ago to be Silent No More about abortion, and I will continue to be silent no more even as our government works to muffle my voice and the voices of all of us who have been changed by abortion. I speak out for the babies, and for the mothers and fathers, and for Canada.