Reclaiming Our Children: A Blog About Healing After Abortion

When I became involved with the Sisters of Life and the
Entering Canaan ministry, it was not long before I recognized many similarities
between the way the older women discussed their emotional traumas and my own
mother’s behavior.  Over the months, I
began to feel that there was more of a connection between them than the mere
proximity of age and socio-economic status of these women to my mother.

            Since I was
a young child, in fact, for as long as my memory exists, my mother has been
horribly plagued by depression.  So much
so that there have been entire portions of my childhood where she was
hospitalized or so heavily medicated and affected that she was completely
dysfunctional.  She would often spend
entire days in bed, leaving us, as children, to our own devices.  The picture began to replay itself in my mind
as I listened to the stories of older women who suffered the guilt of
terminating their pregnancies and a curiosity grew about my own mother.

            I am a forty-one
year old post-abortive man.  The termination
of my child’s life took place sixteen years ago.  My mother never knew about the abortion and,
like so many post-abortive parents, I have not shared the secret with many
people outside of the safety of the ministry. 
One Saturday last year, I sat with my mother and shared my story of
guilt with her.  She was so moved that
she shared her story with me.

            I am the
youngest of three children.  Between my
mother’s pregnancy with my older brother and with me, there was a fourth
child.  It was the early 1960’s and my
mother was a young mother of two children already with an ambitious husband who
was not at home much to help with the children. 
When she suspected that she was pregnant again, she went to her doctor
and expressed an inability to deal with another pregnancy so soon.  Her doctor gave her an injection which was
supposed to bring on her menstrual cycle. 
When her menstrual cycle did not start, she returned to her doctor.  He told her that he wanted to examine her and
as he did so, she said that she felt a sharp pinch and asked him what he was
doing.  Without discussing it with her,
he had pulled the developing embryo from her uterine wall, aborting the
pregnancy.

            Her mental
and physical well-being deteriorated steadily from that point on.  Two years later, I was born.  Though I never felt any lack of emotional nurturing
from my mother, she was never fully with us. 
She eventually came under the care of several psychiatrists and was
hospitalized numerous times during my youth. 
My sister and brother and I spent large blocks of time being cared for
by our grandparents and we did suffer some neglect, though nothing so serious
that it posed any kind of a threat.   We
missed our mother and the abortion took her and our sibling from us.

            She is not
ready to discuss this episode of her life with anyone.  She told me that she divulged it to one
psychiatrist whom she trusted.  Knowing
that she was a Catholic, he recommended that she confess it to a priest.  She did and she received absolution, however,
it was not enough for her.  She has since
dwelled upon the sin and never healed. 
She will not come with me to the Entering Canaan ministry’s day of
prayer and healing.  She is not ready.

            Abortion
hurts women, it hurts families and it destroys lives.  My undeveloped sibling had his or her short
existence destroyed.  The tragedy is
multiplied manifold by the destruction of my mother’s health and my family’s loss
of having a whole person to raise us.  I
have no hatred or resentment for my mother, as I am sure that she worried would
be the case.  I cannot judge her, having
committed the act myself, knowingly and with premeditation.  I grieve for her loss, so great and
unfathomable.  A lifetime swept away with
guilt, wasted and unforgiven.  I pray for
peace and quiet to embrace her soul and the soul of my lost sibling and I pray
for their joyous reunion in an eternity of love and forgiveness.  Meanwhile, I wait for her, in His time, to
accompany me on my journey of redemption.

                   –

James