Month: April 2013

Abortion is hard even for women who feel they made the right decision. This testimony from a book by a pro-choice author illustrates the feelings some women have:

“I had an abortion when I was 17. It was illegal then, so my parents took me to Mexico. The memories were painful. But I never talked about them.

When I was 22 I had an abortion, part of the ending of a marriage. It was still illegal in Arizona, so I went to California…

At 26, a second marriage ended with my third abortion. It was now legal in Arizona, so I didn’t have to run away. It was neat, clean, and fast. I woke from the anesthetic sobbing. The nurse, trying to comfort me, repeated, “It’s all right, dear. It’s over. It’s over.” I knew – that’s why I cried. But I didn’t talk about it.

The American psychological Association announced recently that “most women who have abortions experience a sense of relief,” rather than “any lasting psychological trauma.” I felt that relief – every time.

I got on with my life, as everyone around me advised…

For so many years – I resisted – thinking about the abortions. It always hurt too much. After the first one, I would count years by their ages. I’d imagine how old each child would’ve been that year. After the second, after the third, it became too difficult to carry their ages. I knew it was hurting thing to do. I accepted the abortions as done, as choices, awful choices, between fire and ice, between rocks and hard places… No one told me that a woman, a girl, who chooses to enter pregnancy has the right to mourn. I thought that since I have chosen abortion, I had given up that right.”

Ruth Colker Abortion and Dialogue: Pro-Choice, Pro-Life, and American Law (Bloomington: Indiana University press, 1992) X IV

Women deserve better than abortion.

A POST ABORTIVE MOTHER’S RESPONSE TO THE “I HAD AN ABORTION T-SHIRT” Stand true pro-life outreach

“Today I came across a pro-abortion image that made my skin crawl. There was no blood, no little aborted baby parts, no image of death. Instead it was a photo of Gloria Steinem, smiling, arms raised in a celebratory pose, wearing a t-shirt that read, “I had an abortion.” Beneath her it asked, “Do you really need to inconvenience yourself for the next 18 years?”….

As a post-abortive mother of four, this infuriated and disgusted me on many different levels…..

There was a time in my early 20s when all I wanted was to get pregnant and have a child. Desperately. I would practically DARE my boyfriend, and alternately BEG him to begin our little family. Why then, when I finally conceived my first child, was I so easily convinced to “take care of it”? I don’t have an answer. I can say with certainty that if he had reacted with “That’s great news! We’re going to have a family!” that I would have kept the child. Never did I feel like this was my body and my decision. It was us and our decision and he decided that abortion was the answer and I didn’t argue. The very night of the procedure I drank all of the whiskey I could find and I did that for most of the nights following for several months. I wanted to leave the country. I wanted therapy. I wanted to die. I wanted, more than anything in the world, to be INCONVENIENCED FOR THE NEXT 18 YEARS. But I chose not to be inconvenienced, to have my uterine contents removed, to spend the next several years suffering from my decision. Now as I stand on the sidewalk in front of Charlotte’s abortion mills, I am joined by friends who are unable to conceive. How must they feel, longing for a child, watching a woman who chooses convenience over a lifetime of love?”

Read the entire testimony here.