Reclaiming Our Children: A Blog About Healing After Abortion

Women are not the only one with rights.

Today at 10am students across the country  will be staging a walk out to end abortion and bring attention to the need to support those in crisis pregnancies. The walk out originated with Brandon Gillespie, a student at Rocklin High School in Rocklin, California. It is no big surprise that schools will not be treating this the same way as the gun control walk out.

As usual, pro abortion advocates like Kellie Copeland are sounding the alarm to discredit todays student walk out in protest of abortion, which she says will “shame women for their reproductive health care choices” (aka abortion). At the same time, Kellie and others in the pro-abortion movement continue to deny the shame and pain millions of women who have had abortions experience through this violent act of killing their unborn child, the real issue which brings about shame. I know I am one of them and have worked with thousands of other women who feel the same over the past twenty years.

With the continued denial of abortions harm to women despite women themselves speaking out, our country has not even begun to address the impact of abortion on millions of other family members.

Forty-five years after its legalization, over 60 million abortions have been performed in our country. Countless numbers of people have come to find out about a missing brother or sister  lost through abortion.

This knowledge often impacts them for years as they seek to heal from the pain of the loss and deal with the many complicated issues it brings to the surface.

• Would my name be the same?
• Was I wanted?
• Why am I alive and my sibling is dead?
• Was it a boy or a girl?
• I wonder what my sibling would have been like?

For the past eight years we at Lumina, have been conducting weekends for people who have lost a sibling from abortion. Siblings have attended from across the country seeking healing and understanding from their deep pain which often has been held in for many years. One woman drove overnight from Florida to Maryland after hearing about the weekend. “I could not believe someone was actually going to address this pain”, she said, “I have been carrying it around for years. I had to get here no matter what.”

Many siblings become pro-choice believing to be otherwise would be condemning their mother. Like many women who abort, they are intent on supporting abortion to justify what they do not want to look at. One only must listen to the language of abortion, which clearly does not speak of exactly what it is but instead uses words like “choice’, or “reproductive health” instead of the truth of what abortion is the killing of an unborn child.

“I hated my mom for taking my brother away from me,” one sibling a shared, “I blamed her for the fact that I’d always longed for an older brother and felt a close bond with my cousins who would have been similar in age to my brother. I became obsessed with thinking about my brother. I wrote him letters, wrote poems about him, tried to draw out what I imagined he would look like, kept careful track (as best I could) of how old he would be, named him, and deeply grieved over all the things in my family that my brother hadn’t gotten to witness or be a part of. It was an intense grief process that took me years to walk through, and a very silent pain that no one, not even my own family knew about.”

Sadly, many siblings carry this pain alone. Some have lost multiple siblings. Perhaps their mother or father both had abortions in college and then aborted a child together leaving the absence of three siblings. It is a difficult place to be, with conflicting emotions of loving your parent who has protected you while knowing they aborted someone else or taking on the role of parenting them through their pain and grief.

Millions of young people in our country are missing a brother or sister or as the walkout tomorrow suggests, millions of classmates. We have a deeply wounded generation. Some know the reason why even if their parents do not know they know, while others are kept in the dark unable to understand why things are they way they are in their families. We have created a generation of “wanted and unwanted” children instead of cherishing the dignity and value of life. They feel it.

Abortion does more than kill the unborn. The impact is far reaching. We can continue to deny the damage it has done under the guise of women’s rights, but we are living with the repercussion’s every day. Abortion hurts millions of women (even the pro-choice side admits to at least 10%) men, and yes, siblings.

I am so proud of those who are staging this walk out today. Their voices need to be heard. They have rights too. They should not be regarded as wanted or unwanted by a society that refuses to take responsibility for their own actions. Abortion may be legal but that does not mean it is right or there are no consequences. We are living with them every day.