Reclaiming Our Children: A Blog About Healing After Abortion

This is a reprint of an article I had on Catholic Exchange 6 years ago. I happen to come across it the other day. I think it is worth posting again…these are our children….

I must admit, sometimes in this abortion debate I feel like I am floating on the periphery, looking on, while the world dissects and argues about abortion, and concerning the unborn and the women who have them.

For me, as a post-abortive mother, it is much more personal. It is about reclaiming my child.

It is about relationships, family, and my son, who is now “living in the Lord” (Gospel of Life, JPII).

At seventeen years old, I hid my pregnancy from my parents for over four months. When I finally told them, I was asked to leave the house and forget that I was their daughter. Coming from a Catholic family, it was the one scenario I had not played out in my head.

Staying temporarily at a friend’s, the pressures to abort began: I fought with the baby’s father, and my own father began having my sister call me telling me to have an abortion. With no job, no money and no place go, in the end, I gave in to his demands — like many other women, it was not because of free choice, it was because I felt I had no choice.

The trauma of that day is still vivid in my mind, with no one telling me the development of my son or anything about the procedure I was about to undergo. I had a saline abortion in a hospital room by myself. After many hours of labor, I gave birth to a dead baby boy. To this day over thirty-five years later, I can still see him clearly and remember thinking, “How can this be legal?”, but it is.

I know some people reading this will say I have no right to claim my son having aborted him, and, they are right. I am a sinner deserving of nothing but eternal damnation. But, thank God, His ways are not our ways.

God desires for those of us who are post abortive to reclaim our children, because it is in doing so that I have found His peace. He gave my son to me. I may have rejected this wonderful gift of life, but it is STILL His desire that I claim my son. He is the God of second chances, and third chances, and on, and on, and on.

the rest is here