Post-abortive father G Spencer Schirs, Jr. wrote a book about his experience with abortion. In the book, he presents a letter he wrote to his aborted baby, who he calls Grace:
“We bought the lies that you were simply a choice, nothing more than a cluster of cells to be sacrificed at the altar of convenience. I apologize to you for not being the man I thought I was. Because of my selfishness at that moment, I sacrificed what was likely one of the greatest gifts I might ever receive – you.
I have imagined you as a little girl, for some reason, with big eyes and an even bigger smile. Because of that image, there has been an emptiness within me. A day has not passed that I do not think of you and what my life would have been like with you in it…
Every time I hear a child laugh, I cannot help but wonder what your laugh would have been like or what your favorite flower or color might have been…
Your mom and I were young… Your mother was scared… I believe that had I simply asked her to keep you, she would have.”
G Spencer Schirs, Jr. The Anvil of Guilt and Shame: A Man’s Perspective on Abortion, Forgiveness, and Calling (Murrells Inlet, South Carolina: Covenant Books, 2020) 8
A woman who was considering abortion after a pregnancy resulting from rape agreed to a free ultrasound at a pregnancy center. She describes her baby:
“She was blinking. She was just hanging out, looking around, sucking on her thumb. … It was so realistic, so lifelike. It looks like you can just reach right in there and pick up the baby.
I know they have a heartbeat at 4 to 6 weeks, but it still doesn’t feel as real to you until you see a human. It amazed me.”
She chose life.
She doesn’t regret it and says:
“I never thought I could love or bond with a child [who] was conceived under such horrible circumstances, but that’s where we don’t give God enough credit. I look at her, and I don’t even see him. She’s beautiful and perfect.”
Karla Dial “Bringing Good Things to Life” Citizen June 2003
Pro-life activist Janet Porter told the following story:
“I remember attending a pro-life concert in Cleveland. One of the musicians asked the audience how many believe in abortion for a 12-year-old girl who is raped by her father. Hands went up all over the room.
She then looked to all those who believed in abortion for that hard case and said, “You just killed me. And not only me, but all of my children, and all of their children.”
Abortion takes the lives of the most innocent and robs us of generations.”
OB/GYN Dr. Lori Buzzett describes how she went from pro-choice to pro-life:
Hi, I’m Dr. Lori Buzzett. And I’m an obstetrician gynecologist. I believed that the government shouldn’t have a say in what a woman did with her pregnancy. I felt that abortion shouldn’t be used as a form of contraception, but there were certain circumstances where I felt that it was acceptable for a woman to undergo an elective termination.
I began my training at a university based OBGYN residency program. In our training, we were actually required to go through the procedure and how to learn to do an elective termination.
My mentor showed me how to do the first abortion and then he had me take his seat and he walked me through the steps of the termination. And at the end, I just remember feeling very nauseated. As I left, I ran into one of the staff and he told me how proud he was that I had participated in that activity. And I don’t remember what I said to him, but I just remember thinking that is nothing to be proud of.
I knew that I would never do an elective termination, but I still held my pro-choice views at that time.
After I completed my residency, I entered into private practice and soon after that, my husband and I were expecting our first child. We were very excited. And because I had an opportunity as an OB to have an ultrasound early on, we were able to see our baby’s heartbeat.
I found myself lying on the ultrasound table, looking at a screen where our baby’s heart lay motionless. I left myself a little bit of time to cry, but then quickly collected myself and decided upon learning of our baby’s demise that I would spontaneously miscarry. I felt very responsible that I had lost the baby.
I shoved those feelings down, eventually miscarried, and soon buried myself back into my busy schedule of call and deliveries and surgeries. Because after all, once a woman experienced an early pregnancy loss, everything went back to normal, right?
The next six months [it] became more and more difficult for me to go to work. I finally confided my feelings with a close friend of mine, and she told me that I was grieving the loss of our child. I hadn’t let myself recognize my grief because of the following thought: if life didn’t begin until a baby could sustain itself outside of the womb, why was I in so much pain?
So, my pro-choice stance started to crack. As I continued on in my practice, I was given a new set of eyes with these revelations, and I began seeing the brokenness that these terminations were causing, and it has just made me realize that as obstetricians, we need to stop being complacent and allowing these babies to be disregarded.
When we completed our medical training, we took an oath to do no harm. And in what I’ve seen, there are two of our patients that are suffering when we allow elective terminations. It’s time for us to really take a hard look at what our profession is doing. And advocate for our patients’ health and well-being.
I would invite you to join me as we hold out our hands to help the most vulnerable in our society, our unborn children.
“When my girlfriend told me she was pregnant, I knew the baby was mine. I knew I’d take care of it. I loved her. I wanted to marry her. I would have raised the child alone, if that’s what she wanted.
But it was her choice. I told her I’d help her with whatever she decided. She said she was having an abortion and that was it.
I didn’t feel good about it, but I was determined to support her decision… I wanted our relationship to last. I thought having the abortion like she wanted would help.
But we were both changed afterward. I tried to keep us together. I tried so hard. But things kept getting worse until we finally broke it off after two years.
My girlfriend and I were occasional users before the abortion but afterward things got so out of control. My ex-girlfriend is still messed up. She’s usually wasted. I’ve tried to help her and talk to her about how the abortion is affecting her, but it only makes things worse…
I carry tremendous guilt about this. I don’t know if I can forgive myself.”
After Abortion Stories: How Abortion Changes You (no author listed, no date)
A woman named Nancy was walking into an abortion clinic when a pro-life sidewalk counselor stopped her. She says:
“When I stepped out of the taxi, I was gently approached by an older lady who handed me a brochure. Her only words were, “Do you really want to do this?” I burst into tears and said “No!”
If not for the pro-life advocates outside that abortion clinic that day and the advice they offered about other options, I would also have ended that pregnancy – and my beautiful daughter would not be here today.”
Dr. Debbie Garratt, PhD Alarmist Gatekeeping: Abortion (2021) 123
“I’ve never felt so powerless in all my life. The depression and anger really worry me. The trouble is, I am not sure I have the right to feel this way. She never even asked what I wanted. I felt I didn’t have the right to voice my feelings.”
Rev. William F Maestri Choose Life and Not Death: A Primer on Abortion, Euthanasia and Suicide (New York: Alba House, 1986) 42
“I always name my origin. It didn’t hold me back… I was born in poverty. My father raped my mother when she was 12. Now they’ve named a park for me in Chester, Pennsylvania.”
Quoted in Thomas J Bliley, Jr of Virginia, Congressional Records, Extension of Remarks (Washington, DC, House of Representatives, July 25, 1983)
“After the abortion, we ended up separating. Yet I sensed I was not the same. There was a sense of grief and shame in my life that clung to me even though I tried to shrug it off.”
Dr. Lizzie Ling and Vaughan Roberts Abortion (The Good Book Company, 2020) 55
In a book that collected essays about abortion, editor Phyllis Tickle describes her children:
“There are seven of them now, children of my body and fruit of our love, Sam’s and mine, for almost four decades of mated life.
But there are others as well, the children who haunt me and for whom, even in this time of my advancing age, I mourn and whose demise I have never accepted. They are the dead ones, the babies whom I miscarried, for I did miscarry. Over and over and over again I miscarried, until it seems that for every child we brought to term, three had been lost.
Most of them were lost to me in a flood of waste and blood when they were halfway toward safety. They were lost as children whose sex and shape I could plainly see as they floated away from me in the commode where I had to flush them or the old newspapers in which my hands had to wrap them, for in the 1960s and 70s they were children only to me.
To the world beyond my cramping heart they were a medical accident of routine occurrence, part of the byproduct of active living. The church said no words over them and perceived no loss from their namelessness; medicine reduced them to statistics in the record of my parity.
But I could never so reduce the memories of the swirling waters carrying my children away to sewage plants, nor could the shadows of their presence ever be exorcised from the dining tables of Christmases and Thanksgivings, of birthdays and anniversaries.”
Phyllis Tickle, ed. Confessing Conscience: Churched Women on Abortion (Nashville, Tennessee: Abingdon Press, 1990) 10 – 11
