Kathleen
It was my seventeenth birthday.
I missed school that day, and my friend drove me to the hospital. I was
admitted and put into a ward with other young ladies who were waiting for their
abortions. Later, I was wheeled into the operating room and put under
general anesthetic. I woke up bleeding, in pain, nauseated, and had a very
large tell-tale bruise where the IV had been. Late that afternoon I was
released. My friend picked me up to drive me home. We arrived at my
home to my seventeenth birthday party. My whole family was there. I
hid my hand to avoid any questions about the bruise. No one knew that
night, as they celebrated the day I was born that I had taken the life of my
first child.
It didn’t end here. I had
two more abortions after this. Abortion appeared to be the easy way out.
I could get on with my life. I viewed it as a solution to a
problem. However, what seemed like easy way out became like a double-edged
sword of negative physical and emotional consequences. Abortion isn’t a
safe procedure. It is a surgery with risks. I experienced
hemorrhaging, intense cramping, infection, and fever. There are many other
risks and complications to abortions. Emotionally, I suffer from deep
depressions, break-ups with boyfriends, guilt, shame, anger, fear, and a sense
of enduring worthlessness. When I did have a child, I found that it was
difficult to fully bond with her for quite some time. And I also
experienced sexual problems in my marriage. What looked like the easy way
out on the outside led to my destruction on the inside. What I thought was
the best choice at the time, in reality, it was the worst. There’s a way
that seems right to men, but in the end, it leads only to death. Abortion
for me was a secret sin that kept me in bondage to a cycle of sexual sin.
I started on the road to healing
by taking the first step of repentance. By God’s grace, and through God’s
strength by breaking the cycle of promiscuity and abortion and by receiving
God’s complete forgiveness, mercy, and grace, by recognizing abortion as a loss
of life, and by being able to grieve these profound losses caused by my own
selfish choices, I was restored emotionally. By going through a
post-abortion Bible study, and set free from guilt and shame by God’s abundant
grace, through restitution, God has given me opportunities to help take other
women who have been hurt by abortion to a post-abortion Bible study, because it
is only in God that hope is given and healing is found. And I also want to
be silent no more.
I was driving one day and
listening to a pastor on the radio, and he said something that really touched my
heart. He said, “There is more grace in God’s heart, than there is sin in
your past.”
Thank you.
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