Kathleen

 

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 the day I was born that I had taken the life of my first child.

 

It didn�t end here.� 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 suffer 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.� Abortion for me was a secret sin that kept me in bondage to a cycle of sexual sin.�

 

I 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.�

 

Thank you.