It was my seventeenth birthday. I missed school that day, and my friend drove me to the hospital.  I was admitted and put into a ward with other young ladies who were waiting for their abortions. Later, I was wheeled into the operating room and put under general anesthetic. I woke up bleeding, in pain, nauseated, and had a very large tell-tale bruise where the IV had been. Late that afternoon I was released. My friend picked me up to drive me home. We arrived at my home to my seventeenth birthday party. My whole family was there. I hid my hand to avoid any questions about the bruise. No one knew that night, as they celebrated, that the day I was born I, had taken the life of my first child.
 
It didn’t end there.  I had two more abortions after this. Abortion appeared to be the easy way out. I could get on with my life. I viewed it as a solution to a problem. However, what seemed like easy way out became like a double-edged sword of negative physical and emotional consequences. 

Abortion isn’t a safe procedure. It is a surgery with risks. I experienced hemorrhaging, intense cramping, infection, and fever. There are many other risks and complications to abortions. Emotionally, I suffered from deep depressions, break-ups with boyfriends, guilt, shame, anger, fear, and a sense of enduring worthlessness. When I did have a child, I found that it was difficult to fully bond with her for quite some time.  And I also experienced sexual problems in my marriage. What looked like the easy way out on the outside led to my destruction on the inside. What I thought was the best choice at the time, in reality, it was the worst.  “There’s a way that seems right to men, but in the end, it leads only to death.” That’s in the Bible. Abortion for me was a secret sin that kept me in bondage to a cycle of sexual sin. 
 
I have started on the road to healing by taking the first step of repentance. By God’s grace, and through God’s strength by breaking the cycle of promiscuity and abortion and by receiving God’s complete forgiveness, mercy, and grace, by recognizing abortion as a loss of life, and by being able to grieve these profound losses caused by my own selfish choices, I was restored emotionally. By going through a post-abortion Bible study, and set free from guilt and shame by God’s abundant grace, through restitution, God has given me opportunities to help take other women who have been hurt by abortion to a post-abortion Bible study, because it is only in God that hope is given and healing is found.  And I also want to be silent no more.
 
I was driving one day and listening to a pastor on the radio, and he said something that really touched my heart.  He said, “There is more grace in God’s heart, than there is sin in your past.”

Click here to watch Kathleen's video.

["Forgiven and Set Free" is one post abortion Bible study for women. Click here for the details.]