ClinicQuotes

This is Sarah Smith’s story in her own words:

“Twenty-nine years ago [as of 1999] my mother decided to have an abortion. At the time, she was pregnant with twins, but nobody knew this, not even her doctor. My tiny brother and I were both there growing in her womb, until that dreadful day. Before the abortion, we were both alive. Moments later, I was alone.

It’s frightening to think I was almost aborted when my mom had a D&C abortion. Somehow, miraculously, I survived! My twin brother wasn’t so lucky. Andrew was aborted and we lost him forever.

Several weeks later, my mother was shocked to feel me kicking in her womb. She already had five children and she knew what it felt like when a baby kicked in the womb. She instantly knew that somehow she was still pregnant. She went back to the doctor and told him she was still pregnant…that she had made a big mistake and that she wanted to keep this baby.

To this day, my mother deeply regrets that abortion. I know the pain is unbearable for her at times when she looks at me and knows she aborted my twin brother. Mom says ‘the protective hand of Almighty God saved my life . . . that God’s hand covered and hid me in her womb, and protected me from the scalpel of death.

After surviving the abortion, I was born with bilateral, congenital dislocated hips and many other physical handicaps. Nine days after I was born, I was taken to an orthopedic surgeon who applied a cast to each of my tiny legs. My mom would remove these casts with pliers every Monday morning and take me to the doctor to have new casts put on.

At six weeks I was put into my first body cast. Many surgeries and body cast followed over the next few years. Unfortunately, doctors are telling me that now I’ll need surgeries about every 5 years (please pray for me).

Today, I thank God I survived the abortion, but the pain continues for everyone in my family. In memory of my brother Andrew, we bought a memorial gravestone and placed it in a cemetery in Southern California. It reads:

ANDREW JAMES SMITH, TWIN BROTHER OF SARAH — IN OUR HEARTS YOU’LL ALWAYS BE ALIVE — NOVEMBER 1970

Please share our story with others so the tragedy of abortion stops hurting babies and families. Everyone needs to know the truth about abortion. Thank you.”

Did Sarah only become a person when she was born? Or was she a person in her mother’s womb when the doctor tried to abort her? When an abortion fails, what is left is a survivor. The tiny heart that was beating when the abortionist’s tools missed her is the same heart that beats now.

Here is an excerpt from a speech Sarah gave at a pro-life convention in Rome:

“I did not know of the abortion until I was 12 years old. I grew up feeling that I was the same as my friends, except for having numerous surgeries and physical complications. The only difference I felt was an incredible loneliness and a knowledge that something was missing. I never felt whole.

“I battled with severe depression and found myself dying of anorexia nervosa at age 12, when my mother knew it was time to tell me the truth. She sat next to me and took my hand and looked me in the eyes and said, ‘Sarah, you are a twin. I aborted your twin brother and tried to abort you. Please know I did not know what I was doing and I pray someday you are able to forgive me. I love you and need you to know that you are a welcome part of our family.’

“At that moment I knew what I had been missing all my life and that I was called to something much greater than I had knowledge of. Immediately I felt the overwhelming pain of the knowledge that I should be dead.

“As I stand before you today,” Sarah told her Rome audience, “I am painfully aware that this is only possible because my twin brother took a scalpel for me, and I stand in his place and memory, giving him honor and a face. Statistics are coldly impersonal and cannot convey the human tragedy of the abortion slaughter. Thirty-two million babies [have been] killed in the United States alone. Yet every one had a face, a life, a Creator who loved them and created them in His image. As you look at me today, you realize that I am no different than you, yet I stand before you today a representative of the dead – a representative of the innocent lives who today may lose their lives. Who will speak for them?”

For more information on Sarah, to order a video about her or to read the text of her speech in Rome, go to Abortion Facts and Testimonies at prolife.com

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Gianna Jessen is a Christian singer/songwriter who was adopted after being born alive after a saline abortion.

Here is the text of Jessen’s speech before a House Subcommittee in 1996:

My name is Gianna Jessen. I am 19 years of age. I am originally from California, but now reside in Franklin, Tennessee. I am adopted. I have cerebral palsy. My biological mother was 17 years old and seven and one-half months pregnant when she made the decision to have a saline abortion. I am the person she aborted. I lived instead of died.

Fortunately for me the abortionist was not in the clinic when I arrived alive, instead of dead, at 6:00 a.m. on the morning of April 6, 1977. I was early, my death was not expected to be seen until about 9 a.m., when he would probably be arriving for his office hours. I am sure I would not be here today if the abortionist would have been in the clinic as his job is to take life, not sustain it. Some have said I am a “botched abortion”, a result of a job not well done.

There were many witnesses to my entry into this world. My biological mother and other young girls in the clinic, who also awaited the death of their babies, were the first to greet me. I am told this was a hysterical moment. Next was a staff nurse who apparently called emergency medical services and had me transferred to a hospital.

I remained in the hospital for almost three months. There was not much hope for me in the beginning. I weighed only two pounds. Today, babies smaller than I was have survived. A doctor once said I had a great will to live and that I fought for my life. I eventually was able to leave the hospital and be placed in foster care. I was diagnosed with cerebral palsy as a result of the abortion.

My foster mother was told that it was doubtful that I would ever crawl or walk. I could not sit up independently.

Through the prayers and dedication of my foster mother, and later many other people, I eventually learned to sit up, crawl, then stand. I walked with leg braces and a walker shortly before I turned age four. I was legally adopted by my foster mother’s daughter, Diana De Paul, a few months after I began to walk. The Department of Social Services would not release me any earlier for adoption.

I have continued in physical therapy for my disability, and after a total of four surgeries, I can now walk without assistance. It is not always easy. Sometimes I fall, but I have learned how to fall gracefully after falling 19 years.

I am happy to be alive. I almost died. Every day I thank God for life. I do not consider myself a by-product of conception, a clump of tissue, or any other of the titles given to a child in the womb. I do not consider any person conceived to be any of those things.

I have met other survivors of abortion. They are all thankful for life. Only a few months ago I met another saline abortion survivor. Her name is Sarah. She is two years old. Sarah also has cerebral palsy, but her diagnosis is not good. She is blind and has severe seizures. The abortionist, besides injecting the mother with saline, also injects the baby victims. Sarah was injected in the head. I saw the place on her head where this was done. When I speak, I speak not only for myself, but for the other survivors, like Sarah, and also for those who cannot yet speak …

Today, a baby is a baby when convenient. It is tissue or otherwise when the time is not right. A baby is a baby when miscarriage takes place at two, three, four months. A baby is called a tissue or clumps of cells when an abortion takes place at two, three, four months. Why is that? I see no difference. What are you seeing? Many close there eyes…

The best thing I can show you to defend life is my life. It has been a great gift. Killing is not the answer to any question or situation. Show me how it is the answer.

There is a quote which is etched into the high ceilings of one of our state’s capitol buildings. The quote says, “Whatever is morally wrong, is not politically correct.”

Abortion is morally wrong. Our country is shedding the blood of the innocent. America is killing its future. All life is valuable. All life is a gift from our Creator. We must receive and cherish the gifts we are given. We must honor the right to life.

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One day when I was in third grade, my mom and dad asked me to sit down for a talk. They began by saying that since I was very little, my parents always found me sleeping curled tightly in the fetal position, buried in the covers and always to one side of the bed. I had a recurring nightmare of being trapped in a room with a window blocked by a knife, and they said they often found me talking to my “other self.” My mom said she though these were signs telling her to confess something she had done and hoped I would forgive her.

She told me how, at 39, with her 5 children grown, (the youngest was 19 years old and two were in college), she had found herself pregnant. She had been pressured especially by a particular friend to abort because she was too old and it would be “ridiculous” at her age, to have a baby. This was 1952, and her friend told her a self abortion method. She delayed her abortion attempt until the end of June, her eldest son Elliott’s, birthday. She was about 3 months pregnant.

She started to cry and told me never to believe them when they tell you it is not a baby, but just a blob of tissue. Tracing a tiny outline in the palm of her hand, she said “he was this big and a fully formed baby.” She could hardly continue. “He was a perfect little baby boy.” She cried to heaven on that cold bathroom floor and asked God to forgive her and promised Him if she were ever to become pregnant again, she would NEVER abort a baby. She flushed her little son down the toilet and said she lay on the cold floor crying until she was numb.

No one knew, except her and her so called “friend.” Later, she still felt pregnant. The doctor said that I was probably a tumor or an ulcer. And the first part of September, I kicked her! The doctor was amazed that I had been a hiding twin and survived the abortion attempt. She told no one of her pregnancy except my dad, and later, my youngest brother, 19 year old Fred, who I kicked.

I was due January 21, 1953, however, I was induced one month early on December 19, 1952, and after 3 days of labor, I was born at the Hour of Mercy, 3:30 P.M., Sunday, December 21, 1952. She asked me to forgive her. I asked if she loved me NOW because she did not know me then. She sobbed and sobbed and said, “Yes. I love you with my very life.” I said, “Ok,” and walking back down the hall to my room I could still hear her heartbreaking sobs. When my dad hurried and caught my arm, he whispered, “I did not do it.” And pointing to Mom, he said, “She did!” And I believe the Holy Spirit said this to him through me: “But your love was supposed to make her feel safe to have me.” Those words hit his heart and stopped him from coming any further. (Note: I never slept curled up or had nightmares after this day.)

Years came and went. My mom’s “illness” without a name was cyclical and caused her to take to her bed from the end of June to the beginning of September. Sometimes she flew into rages, or walked the floors night after night, or went on buying binges. She suffered from paranoia, and gobbled down her doctor’s pills. This led to stays in mental hospitals, filled with psychotropic drugs and painful electroshock therapy. Part of the therapy was to tell her it was shame abortion was not legal then, because she could have gone to college, had a career…and not wasted her talents. I remember when I looked deeply into her drugged eyes and told her one summer day, “I know my mom is in there somewhere and some day when I grow up, I am going to find out what this illness is!” We all suffered. Around me I saw other moms with similar problems and obsessions. Now we were living in the days of Roe v. Wade. Imagine the scope of my mom’s pain from just one abortion attempt, and now women have multiple abortions! Three months before my mom died, I asked her why all the breakdowns June through September every year. Why? she broke down in tears and said it was on Elliott’s birthday (the end of June) that she aborted my brother and when Elliott had died tragically at age 27, she felt she had caused the death of her first born son when she aborted her last son. By September she remembered the day I kicked her and how happy she was, and that would bring her out of her moods. She could not trust herself and hated herself for aborting her baby! How could God forgive her? It was a form of self punishment for a crime she felt she could not be forgiven. I told her that is why Jesus died and that God forgave her when she found out that she was still pregnant with me. He trusted her to give me life. She never saw this until the day I told her. Three months later she died, but at peace, and forgiven.

Then and now, silence from the pulpit, the medical and psychiatric communities keep this killing cycle going. Now we have a name for the “illness.” It is post-abortion syndrome. But physicians and women’s (so called “rights groups”) do not even recognize it. How many suffer in silence, looking for help. Yet, we live in an age where Project Rachel groups, St. Raphael Ministries retreats, and pro life organizations are breaking through the silence barrier and helping all the victims of abortion to find healing through the cross of Jesus and the life giving sacraments, especially Reconciliation.

I can remain silent no more. I was a survivor of abortion. Life is never a mistake; life is always a blessing from God. Every single person has a divine mission that only they can fulfill.

The Bible says, “…and a child shall lead them.” It is the worst of times because of great sin, but it is the best of times because of an abundance of God’s grace. Love is a decision. Let us decide to be silent no more.

Audrey

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Sharon and her husband were a Christian couple who were using an IUD for contraception. When their IUD failed, they were faced with a grim choice.

The general belief was that if a woman became pregnant while wearing an IUD,a miscarriage was a certainty. Not only that, but the miscarriage would cause a massive infection which would lead to a hysterectomy and possible death. Reluctantly, Sharon went in for an abortion.

Here is what she says about the clinic:

“When we arrived, it was an awful place. They had hard rock music playing, huge flowers on the wallpaper, and I was treated like a bad little girl. We were herded in like cattle, vacuumed out and sent to a recovery room.”

Thinking she was no longer pregnant, Sharon went through three packs of birth control pills over the next few months. She “rode Space Mountain at Disney World, took diet pills prescribed by my doctor, took antihistamines for my allergies and moved into a new home.”

Then she felt her baby move.

She goes on to describe the rest of her pregnancy:

“The next four and a half months were hell. I couldn’t pray. I couldn’t sleep. All I could do was worry about the condition of this child that I had tried to kill. I will tell you at this point that the abortion clinic would not talk to us at all. They would not tell me if they had taken a fetus or if they just missed.”

Her son was born healthy. For twenty years, Sharon and her husband kept their story a secret. Then she sought healing through a ministry.

For Sharon’s complete story, and to read more about post-abortion support from a Christian perspective, go to the Safe Haven Home page.

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