Category: Women’s Stories

“I remember that the doctor who was to actually performed the D&C was an unpleasant person – he seemed to be eaten up with anger (no wonder, what a ghastly lot in life was his if that was his main occupation)… The staff involved seemed callous – callous people, callous in their approach – not that they were rough with me; they strongly impressed me with their indifference to a woman in pain… Inside I screamed protest at their treatment of me – the lack of attention when I awoke with severe pain; the looking through me as if I didn’t really exist; the fact that they weren’t interested in me, as a person, to hear my story or to help me make sense of it all. I remember that, after the pre-med had been administered and I was waiting on the cot outside the [operating room] doors for my turn, I actually managed to lift my heavy head from the pillow to look through the windows in the doors to try and see who and why the surgical staff were creating such a ruckus – there were hooting, and laughing, and regaling loud and apparently hilarious stories to each other while performing these abortions.” 

 Melinda Tankard Reist Giving Sorrow Words: Women’s Stories of Grief after Abortion (Springfield, IL: Acorn Books, 2007) 35 – 36

Katarina, a psychologist from Sydney, Australia,

“My sister has since had two stillbirths – as a family we have grieved and emphasized with her and her husband’s dreadful pain. Inside of me I felt cheated as no one had grieved with me for my two lost children – not even me. My sister’s children died at the same time as both my losses – I felt responsible, guilty, and so alone. When my mom says the no one in the family has experienced pain like my sister my heart cries out silently – but I have.”

Melinda Tankard Reist Giving Sorrow Words: Women’s Stories of Grief after Abortion (Springfield, IL: Acorn Books, 2007) 22

From a postabortion woman, identified as Jane:

“Looking back now, if I had known then what emotional torment I would go through as a result of having the abortion, I would never have gone through with it. I told her [the counselor] that I still didn’t know whether I could go ahead with the abortion, but she just fobbed it off by convincing me that this was the best thing for everyone.”

Melinda Tankard Reist Giving Sorrow Words: Women’s Stories of Grief after Abortion (Springfield, IL: Acorn Books, 2007) 179

A woman named Maria had an abortion and suffered emotionally afterwards. A year after her abortion, she was so distraught that she called the clinic and set up a follow up appointment. The clinic worker she met with was cold and unkind, and even tried to steer her away from a pro-life group that helps postabortion women, putting political ideology ahead of her patient’s healing.:

“I resent not being told that having an abortion had aftereffects. Late last year I went back to the abortion clinic for counseling. The lady I spoke to made me feel like an idiot when I cried and said I wanted to die. I asked her about [the pro-life group] Women Hurt by Abortion. She said not to contact them. She was not impressed that I rang for counseling so long after my abortion. It was like, “What do you want?” They don’t want to see us again, once we have an abortion.”

Melinda Tankard Reist Giving Sorrow Words: Women’s Stories of Grief after Abortion (Springfield, IL: Acorn Books, 2007) 120

Ashley Crowley, whose mother was a teen when she gave birth to her, had an abortion when confronted with a similar situation. Her baby’s father verbally abused her when he found out she was pregnant. She told her story at Abolish Human Abortion:

“And just like my mother, I became pregnant around the same age she became pregnant with me. Somewhere along the road when we were dating, he had promised to step up if I should ever get pregnant, but upon telling him the surprising news, he called me a whore and demanded I abort the “wretched nuisance”.

… I told my mother I was pregnant, taking her to a Planned Parenthood facility where I knew full well they offered abortions. I tricked my mother into taking me to this place because although we were going to find out how far along I was, I never informed her  what they would offer me under the table. But what I hadn’t noticed was their prerogative to transfer upon finding out I was over 18, intentionally isolating me from my mother to go over what services they rendered. I never felt they cared about my situation later on, but because of the mental state I was in, they easily deceived me by saying this would be the only guaranteed way to fix all my problems.

My parents told me if I put my baby up for adoption, they would fight tooth and nail for custody. Additionally, a woman I worked with had offered me money for my baby, and the father of my child didn’t want anything to do with her. But what led me to Baby Erin’s fate was looking at the life of a friend of mine life who struggled to raise her own child as a single mother; received no help from her daughter’s father, and caused a tremendous rift in her parents’ relationship. I felt this baby inside of me was a burden, as much as I had fallen in love with her, so when the clinic determined I was “ripe enough”, I terminated my pregnancy on February 23rd, 2009 at about 7 weeks into my first trimester.

….. I’ll never know if Erin was going to be a boy or a girl. There isn’t a grave I can visit to lay a wreath of flowers on. I don’t even have a picture of Erin. All I have is a receipt of the amount it cost to have Erin killed. Erin exists now only in my memory.”

Ashley Crowley “One mother’s testimony – I listened to Planned Parenthood’s lies” Abolish Human Abortion October 12, 2012

One woman talks about her emotional pain after her abortion:

”It’s been over 10 months after my abortion and it still seems like it was yesterday. It wasn’t because I had a bad life and “I don’t want my child to go through the same thing I went through” and it wasn’t because my parents are rich and “I didn’t want to let them down”. I did it because…. well I don’t know why I did it. I’m not good at making quick decisions and it was thrown in my face so quickly…The abortion to me was like death. It’s like when someone close to you dies your sad, sad, sad when it happens then it kinda goes away after a week or two. But then it blows up in your face HUGE when u least expect it. Like when your having a bad day, or your lonely, or when your really drunk. The difference is death you know is a part of life and has to be accepted because everyone dies but ABORTION… that’s a different story. That blows up in your face, OVER AND OVER AND OVER AND OVER AND OVER AND OVER AND OVER AND OVER AND OVER AND OVER AND OVER AGAIN and you don’t just cry hysterically and weep for a little while I went into a zombie depression for 4 months straight. … I don’t think I’ve ever cried so much before. It hurts, it hurts real deep because there’s nobody to blame but yourself. And it never stops and I wonder if it will ever stop. I was 6 weeks and 6 days pregnant.”

“I’m to Blame” Kaleidoscope Dec 20, 2006

From Sam, a postabortion women:

I had to stumble through a system which was not supportive of my emotional needs, and I certainly did not make an informed decision. At no stage did [they] discuss the alternatives, or the procedure, possible effects or how I felt for that matter … This wasn’t really counseling at all, and my guess was it was to satisfy some legal requirement … no professional created an opportunity for me to discuss anything, really … no one that I came across ever said to me, “Why is this happening to you, what is wrong, why have you had more than one abortion, what can we do about it?”

Melinda Tankard-Reist “This Wasn’t Really Counseling At All” Raising Questions About “Choice” and Pre-Abortion Counseling”  From Giving Sorrow Words: The Unspoken Pain of Abortion