Sex, Drugs, Rock n’Roll…free love…that was my generation.  Viet Nam, the Pill, divorce…we were all just kids born in the fifties who were swept up in the tide of the invention of the Pill – and the legalization of abortion on demand.  

We were BLIND.     

Today, thank God, I can SEE again.  The scales have dropped from my eyes.  I had not one but two abortions in the seventies.  Why?  My friends, even one of my parents, told me it was not a child but a mass of tissue.  They told me the termination of a pregnancy was simple, easy, like cosmetic surgery.  Almost every girl I knew in those days had an abortion.  Most admitted to two or more.  I knew a girl in California who admitted to five!   Both procedures were not medically complicated in my case because they were performed before five weeks had gone by.  This affirmed my feeling that it was not killing my child but rather removing a mere blob of tissue.   Then came the emotional aftermath.     

And as long as I was partying, drinking my beer, and going from boyfriend to boyfriend, I was able to very easily deny the gnawing feeling in my heart that it was WRONG to kill my babies.  Even though, by the grace of God, I am not an alcoholic, I drank to cover up my true feelings.  I became promiscuous and had low self worth.  I was so asleep and unconscious I didn’t even realize it.   Looking back it was bravado – a big performance.

Then came the abusive, alcoholic men; my wake-up call.  I became a battered woman when I was 40 years old!  But it was because of this turn of events that I found recovery through Al-Anon.  By the grace of God, I began the slow painful ascent back to life and the land of TRUTH versus DENIAL.  This was not easy, and has been a long road, but worth every single step.  Through Al-Anon, I returned to my Roman Catholic faith.  I believe that is what finally allowed me to heal and find peace.

I was blessed in that when I went to confession in 1990, and I confessed my two abortions to a priest who said, “Candace, God forgives you…have you forgiven yourself?”  Eureka!  That was the crux of the whole matter.   “God’s Mercy is more powerful than my shame…”

“Neither do I condemn you – go and sin no more..”  Freeing, wonderful words!

And so I encourage ALL OF YOU who have suffered the pain I did to be silent no more.

Onward and upward!