As several states prepare to enshrine abortion rights in their constitutions, it might be wise to consider the experiences of mothers who actually underwent the procedure.
Some of these mothers, of course, are no longer here to talk about their experiences. Their abortions killed them. Jennifer Morbelli died after aborting her daughter at 33 weeks. Keisha Atkins died after her abortion at six months. Both of these women are buried with their daughters.
But even women who were not fatally wounded by abortionists have horror stories to tell. You only have to look as far as the collection of testimonies by the Silent No More Awareness Campaign.
Kathy from Ohio was 15 when she got pregnant, and like many young girls, she postponed telling her parents, perhaps indulging in some magical thinking that her problem would somehow disappear on its own. Instead, her child grew and grew.
“I was in a room with another woman who was having her third abortion,” she wrote. “I lay there hearing her cries and screams as she labored and finally delivered her dead child… I kept telling myself, ‘this is legal after all. They say it’s not a baby yet… Right?’”
Kathy goes on to describe the experience of her own labor and abortion.
I could hear the woman lying in the bed next to me weeping, she said. “And then the intense pain and birth of my dead child.”
The nurse “placed the baby in a plastic tub like discarded trash,” she wrote. “I remember the sound, and she walked out of the room, carrying the tub. I was there by myself, left with all my emptiness.”
Repeat abortions are very common, and Kathy had a second one at 17. She gave birth to a son at 19 and would have three more children with her first husband, but that marriage ended in divorce. “There was an emptiness in me that I expected him to fill,” she said.
Sally in California also had two abortions, the first when she was six months pregnant at the age of 18.
“Without realizing it, the afternoon they put my baby in a bucket was the beginning of self-hatred,” she wrote. “I lost the ability to value life.”
“This was evidenced by my divorce and what came after,” she continued. “I became more deeply involved in a destructive lifestyle… Even in the few serious relationships I had, I allowed physical, verbal, and sexual abuse because subconsciously I believed that I deserved it.”
Kayla in Missouri had an abortion beyond 22 weeks because doctors told her the baby would have Down syndrome and cystic fibrosis.
“The first day they injected my baby in the heart to kill him and I immediately regretted it and knew I couldn’t turn back,” she said. “I cried and cried and was in a deep depression for five years… All I can describe it as is hopelessness.”
“I was in a very, very dark place emotionally and spiritually. As time went on it did not get better… my depression worsened. I was suicidal and had so much anger. I alienated people from my life and isolated myself,” she wrote of the experience.
These are not the stories about abortion people are hearing from the Fake News media. They, and the Democrat candidates, prefer to focus on how terrible it is to “force” a mother to be pregnant. Somehow, they think only one side of the debate matters.
Their stories create the impression that abortion solves problems rather than creating new ones, or that it can be forgotten from one day to the next, leaving no scar tissue.
Yet the growing chorus of women who are Silent No More are the very ones who bought into that lie and but then experienced exactly the opposite.
The Silent No More Campaign arose in November 2002, in part to counter the lies of abortion advocates. The mothers – as well as fathers and other family members – who participate in the campaign have been speaking publicly about their abortion regret since then.
Meanwhile, we see governors of blue states spending tens of millions of dollars to ensure “access” to abortion and making their states “sanctuaries” for this procedure.
Perhaps it’s a better time than ever to listen to the voices of those who have undergone this horrific experience, which stops one heart and breaks another.
Fr. Frank Pavone is National Director of Priests for Life
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