I was an 18 year-old senior in high school when I aborted my first child.  Knowing my much older boyfriend wasn’t too keen on kids, my desire to please him at all costs along with selfishness and shame in my small hometown, led me to request that my doctor provide me the name of the nearest abortion clinic.  My boyfriend and I made the 150-mile trip together and although we married anyway shortly after my graduation, the relationship was left in a shambles, void of intimacy or true communication.  While the two of us abused alcohol, he began drowning himself in his work and I embarked on multiple affairs, a long-term eating disorder, and eventually, another abortion as a result of an affair which finally signaled to me the end of the marriage six years later.

The following year was a blur as I lived a “party” lifestyle, numbing my pain with promiscuity and alcohol and on more than one occasion, contemplating suicide as I thought about how worthless I was feeling.  Within a year after my divorce, I once again found myself pregnant.  This time, however, I had no idea who the father was, and as I had already done twice before, I walked into the abortion mill, laid on the abortionist’s table and allowed the growing life inside my body to be sucked out along with another little piece of my soul.

I was blessed enough to have met my husband shortly afterward and my son was conceived just a few months later. I remember my elation at knowing I would FINALLY become a mother. I came close to suffering a miscarriage, feeling it was the result of my past abortions, but my son was born healthy in 1990 followed by a daughter 18 months later.  Ironically, I never really felt like a good mother and just said I wasn't a "kid" person, leaving them with their dad for another man in early 1996 as the self-destructive patterns continued.  A few months later, however, the miraculous happened as I received Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior and my marriage and family were restored.  My abortions though, were to remain deeply hidden until another time.
 
That time was February of 2000, 18 years after my first abortion, as I walked with my husband in an old cemetery in St. Augustine, FL where we had been spending the weekend celebrating our 10th wedding anniversary.  There in our Nation’s oldest city, among tombstones dating back as far as the 1600’s was one which stood out among all the rest.  I felt somehow drawn to it and as I walked closer, the words on its new and shiny granite face hit me hard: “BABY UNBORN, Dedicated to the Unborn Victims of Abortion.”  At that very moment, I was forced into the acceptance of my past and the fact that my choices had been more than just “a blob of tissue” as I’d been told by the abortion clinics’ staff, but were in fact individuals created with a purpose in the eyes of God.

I’ve learned that God never opens a wound without a hospital nearby to care for it.  He led me to our local pregnancy center the next week where I began HEART - Healing Effects of Abortion Related Trauma.  It wasn’t easy as I worked through the memories I had long repressed; memories of cold and impersonal clinic staff, the feeling of my insides being sucked out, the sound of the vacuum as it did its work, the cramping pain as I was led each time to a room filled with other young women and girls sitting in brown recliners sipping on juice and eating crackers.  I remembered feeling relief after each abortion but I also knew that every year around the same time, I would become depressed, never quite understanding why.  I learned in recovery that so many of the problems in my life had been a direct result of what abortion had done to me mentally, emotionally, relationally and spiritually.  Eating disorders, alcohol abuse, inability to form close personal relationships, extra-marital affairs, bonding issues with my children, perfectionism; all somehow related to what we as a society call a “choice.” 

However, by learning to grieve my losses and coming to terms with the anger, guilt, shame, and years of denial that the lives I had taken were precious gifts from God, I was finally able to recognize the forgiveness and grace given to me by Christ for my abortions and as a result, those areas of my life have been redeemed.  I know now that in addition to the two wonderful children the Lord has blessed me and my husband with, I have three precious children waiting in heaven for me: David, Rebekah, and Grace.  I have found peace in forgiveness and it’s my prayer that through my testimony, you will find your own peace in forgiveness as well.