In choosing to have an abortion, I wish with all my heart that I had understood what pregnancy was. Today I don’t believe that you can erase someone else’s life and pretend that it was never there because that life was there. That fact will haunt you until the day you acknowledge the truth and find healing for your loss as a mother to that life.
I was 19, rebellious, confused, selfish and living the party life. I believed, like many in the 70’s, that it was my right to do whatever I wanted with no regard for any consequences to my choices. I believed the lie that contraceptives worked and found myself pregnant. I wasn’t planning a pregnancy. Abortion was in the news and very political at the time. It was a woman’s body and her right to choose abortion. I happened to go to a doctor who was also very political in her views on abortion. She told me that abortion was easy, that I could go into the hospital on Friday and be back at work on Monday. She also told me that as I was 19, I wouldn’t have to tell anyone about the pregnancy. As far as medical facts she didn’t inform me about fetal development and that at three weeks of gestation there was already a beating heart. What she did say was that it was nothing more than a sprouted wheat seed at this stage, 9 weeks, and that it was an easy procedure. No mess, no fuss!
The truth was that after the abortion I experienced depression, suicidal thoughts, drug and alcohol abuse, and dysfunctional relationships. Relationship difficulties were especially troubling in my marriage and bonding properly with my first-born son. He was born a year to the due date of my aborted child.
In 1985, I experienced difficulty in a pregnancy and had to have an ultrasound at 9 weeks of gestation. It was with great delight and wonder that my husband and I saw our tiny daughter. She was very much alive with tiny hands and feet, a beating heart and very much a human being, just waiting to grow and develop. At the same time the horrible truth hit home of what in fact my husband and I had done to our first child, who was never a sprouted wheat seed but a valuable and precious person. We had murdered our first child.
The reason I am silent no more is that you can’t erase people through abortion. You will remember them someday, because they did have a life and were meant to be born, just like any other baby.