My Abortion "Choice"
...a regret I will never outlive.
I was terrified. I couldn’t even utter the word.
It just wouldn’t come out of my mouth past the first syllable.
About 22 years ago, when it finally hit me what I’d done, when I finally could admit it, not only to myself, but to another living soul, I could not finish the word.
“Abortion.”
Not without dissolving, choking, throat tightening paralysis. Unable to go on, verbally or emotionally.
It took me 3 years, after my priest friend suggested a Rachel’s Vineyard retreat, for me to overcome the terror and actually commit to going on one.
As I walked up the sidewalk to the retreat house, every fiber in my being screamed, “You don’t have to go! Just turn around and drive home! They don’t know you’re here yet! No one will ever need to know!”
Ahh, but Someone already knew. And not just my priest friend. My rubbery legs carried me forward as if by their own accord.
I was also drawn, almost against my will, to begin writing about this, 22 years ago. Knowing I was putting my full name on it with all the risks, I still could not stop asking myself one question, “If it will make a difference to one woman, how can I not write?”
It’s the same feeling I have now. It never left me.
When I was 20 years old, I walked that nerve-wracking, numbing gauntlet into the nearby, inner-city abortion clinic (they weren’t located in the ‘burbs), and aborted my unborn baby. And 20 years later, there I was, writing a letter to the editor of that city’s paper that had just written a nasty story about the elderly, Catholic man who shouted awful hatred at the women like me going in for an abortion at the very same clinic.
I wrote about how that old man met the sensationalistic needs of the media to give them a sound bite that grabs headlines and provides photo ops. That not all pro-lifers agreed with his tactics, even then. I said that most don’t. I certainly didn’t. I also wrote about the older women “escorts” who incessantly repeat “blah-blah-blah” to prevent young women from hearing how much someone else really cares –not just about their unborn babies-- but about them too. Because that’s what the sidewalk counselors who matter, actually say and do, for the women.
My father, who didn’t know about my abortion and who had “picketed” (his word, not mine) abortion clinics for years, read that paper. I thought he’d disown me and not only never speak to me, but tell the rest of the family who would say, “See? We knew she was evil.” I hoped my mother, long since deceased, already had forgiven me. I’d been to confession—twice—before she passed, terrified that once she died, she’d know my truth. But I didn’t feel like God could ever forgive me.
My son also did not know, then. If he heard from classmates whose parents asked them, “Hey, isn’t that the mother of your classmate?” I was going to have to have that talk with him as well.
I’d probably be shunned or at least stared at by countless parishioners at my church: “And she’s a lector here? What a hypocrite!”
I had a ton to lose by coming out about my regret. But if my story could help even one woman decide to have her baby and keep it or give the child to a couple dying to adopt, then it would be worth it.
When I found out I was pregnant in college, I never even thought once about keeping the baby, even though I was raised a strict Catholic. I knew it was a baby, that it was wrong, but I could only feel terrified. All I could think was, “My parents will disown me, toss me out of the house, stop paying for college so I’ll have to quit school, and my boyfriend, though he says he’ll support my decision, surely isn’t likely to do that, without a job or a college degree himself. He says he can get me the $500 to have the abortion. If I don’t, I’ll be all alone, in a state I didn’t grow up in, without a home, a job or anything. I’ll waitress or flip burgers the rest of my life.”
I was the typical college girl with “everything to lose,” and all I could do was act out of fear that my life was over, right then and there. Even though abortion was against everything I was taught and believed, I numbed myself and didn’t think, look at or listen to anyone, much less the “picketers” with the scary signs as I walked through that same parking lot. I believe that old nasty yelling man was also there, trying to scare me. Little did he know, I was scared for myself, not for my soul, not for my baby. Outside the clinic, all I could perceive were Catholics yelling condemnation and violent words. I heard someone yell, “If you go in there, you are guilty of murder!” How could I have turned to them for the help I needed? They were yelling at me, denouncing me!
And nothing the abortion people said or did, showed me the truth of what I was doing. I was never shown an ultrasound. I didn’t know my unborn baby had fingers, toes, a strong regular heartbeat, brainwaves and could feel pain. I was never told how perfectly formed my baby was by that time, that it could even suck its thumb! They were giving me “credit” for being so decisive about my “reproductive rights.” Everyone at Planned Parenthood and the clinic made it all too easy to run away from what I was really doing. I bought into the promise that abortion would return me to exactly who I was before.
That was a lie. It did not happen. I had become a Mom, but that truth was just too painful to bear. Nothing those outside the clinic said or did or tried to make me look at in those final few minutes of my baby’s life, stopped me.
If someone had shown me they cared about me or help me, I might not have done it. If Roe v. Wade had not happened, I would not have done it. But no one offered the help I needed, really, or at least I didn’t listen. If someone had reached me before I made that walk from the car into the clinic, perhaps. But I was a different person, then. I didn’t stop to think or seek help. I chose to run away. I was 20, but I was a little girl still.
My boyfriend had driven me there and tried to protect me from the picketers, but once I was in the abortion room all by myself, I pretended it wasn’t me. I was in such fear that I went into total denial, as though it was happening to someone else.
I have blocked out every memory of the actual abortion except one. I remember the droning, loud, horrible, ear-filling sound of the suction machine. I do not even remember if I cried, but I only remember the sound of that machine and feeling like I was in someone else’s nightmare. That sound was like standing next to an airplane engine. I numbed myself completely. I don’t remember the ride home. I was in shock. I felt physical but empty pain afterward. I shut down, physically, emotionally, mentally. Back in my dorm, I curled up in a ball, didn’t talk to anyone or eat for 3 days. I only told one of my roommates. I could not face what I was doing. I blocked out most details. All I could think was, “This really isn’t happening to me.” It was the only way I could get through it. To deny it fully. As though it wasn’t my baby. As though I wasn’t ever really pregnant.
The research I since have read says that this is one of the symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder: some PTSD victims are unable to recall their trauma experience. It is called “constriction” when the person numbs emotions and avoids anything associated with the traumatic event. Even the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM III-R) officially once--for several years--listed abortion as a life event which can produce PTSD.
I recall clinging to my boyfriend, believing that no one else would ever want or love me, so if I didn’t hang onto him, I would have no marriage or children in my future. I did not think I was worthy of anyone, not even the boyfriend, and despite my own suspicion then that he was the wrong marriage partner for me, I continued the relationship and we married a year and a half later. This is another aspect of PTSD’s “constriction:” a sense of a foreshortened future (e.g., does not expect a career, marriage, children, or a long life).
Twenty-plus years, I buried the pain. I blindly chose relationships with men who took advantage of me, used me or abused me verbally and emotionally or treated me as their subordinate. That two decades began with an 11 rocky, unhappy years of marriage, after which I divorced the father of both my aborted baby and my son. I still feel overwhelming raw grief when I allow myself to relive my choice or think about the daughter I will not hold in my arms in this life.
I do not have breast cancer, although I doubled my risk of getting it by having an abortion, on top of the extra increased risk I incurred from long-term Pill usage. I had been prescribed “the Pill” to attempt to control Stage IV endometriosis that was discovered four years after my abortion.
I consider myself one of the luckier ones. Some women have taken to drugs or alcohol. Others have committed self-harm or gone as far as suicide. I will highlight some of these stories as this Substack goes on.
It took 10 years for my grief and shame to start surfacing (which it did, after the birth of my son), and after 22 years, I suddenly hit the wall. I couldn’t help but cry. I couldn’t even speak the word. How wrong I was. My parents would have blown a gasket, but probably would’ve come around. Even if they hadn’t, there would have been others I hadn’t found yet to help me survive. I only learned that in time. But suddenly, I had to live every day with the irreversible horror that I killed my own child. It is not something I can ever undo, or take back. I will never be free of what I’ve done.
And for all the things I had, all the things I’d accomplished, the education, house, cars, career, the income, the opportunities, the vacations, the toys: I realized then that I’d throw it all away, every last bit of it, in a heartbeat, if I could go back and change my “choice” then. I gladly would be flipping burgers, even today, even all my life, if I could change what I did then. But I couldn’t. I still can’t.
Forty-five years later, I still cry over how wrong I was. I cannot compare the remorse and anguish to anything else I know. Every day, I live with the sorrow of that “choice” that I can never undo.
I came to believe, though, that God does forgive me, even before I asked for forgiveness, and even though I could not forgive myself, then.
Rachel's Vineyard retreat allowed me to grieve, to show how sorry I was. It enabled me to show how much I loved my daughter, and to name her, after not acknowledging her for twenty-four long years. I am healing, but it never stops hurting.
I regret choosing abortion and I know that there are millions of other women who feel this too. We are still the voice that hasn’t been heard much, and needs to be heard.
We know we are living examples of how abortion hurts women, but we also know too well who are the first of our two victims: our unborn children.
Those of us who have been able to accept the strain of being in the public eye know that, in some small way, we can begin to atone by helping others avoid abortion, and by helping others like us to find God’s mercy and forgiveness as we have begun to find it.
Others who can’t go public, don’t need to: healing and recovery can still be your private path.
I wrote that letter to the editor, and it was published, as I’m writing now, because I just don’t want anyone else to have to live with all that.
Do you know the real Jane Roe, of Roe v. Wade? Her name was Norma McCorvey. She eventually came to deeply regret her involvement in the case, even becoming a Christian and later a Catholic.
Did you know that she never had the abortion she’d sought? That she had the baby and gave it up for adoption? And that Roe v. Wade was decided after that happened?? Norma wasn’t even post-abortive.
But before her conversion, Norma at one time admitted she was terrified of ever setting foot in a church. She condemned herself for being the one person around whom this fabricated right to abortion had been created by the Supreme Court (which is not the governmental body to create rights in this nation). She wanted to ask God’s forgiveness, but was afraid that the people in any church she walked into--and God Himself--would be so angry at her that the people would condemn her openly and God would cause the church walls and roof to collapse on her in punishment, killing everyone inside.
This fear was very real for her, as it is for many women who have aborted their children. We may secretly want to seek healing for our choice, but are afraid of being punished as “hypocrites.”
Norma wrote a poem that speaks volumes about her remorse over her part in this 50+-year culture of death:
EMPTY PLAYGROUNDS
By Norma Leah McCorvey
I sit across from a playground that I visited this eve with a small child.
I know of such places where children play.
I know that I am the cause of them not being here today.
These playgrounds for "innocent children" now dead because of sins I helped do.
I hope, Lord, that the wonderful playground is well guarded with angels.
Angels who will protect them keep them happy and safe.
Angels who will make them smile and laugh.
So that when that glorious day comes; the children will not hold "the sin" against me.
For every time I see a playground empty, I will know that yours will be full.
The sun is now setting, and my heart hurts, Lord.
For the numbers who from abortion have been torn apart.
I pray you can put them back together and make them whole.
If you like, Lord, use my body to make your precious children whole again.
I ask you to do this not only for them, Lord, but also for the love I have for each of them.
Lord, God, you gave your only Son, and He died and shed His blood for us.
All I did was give my baby away so that "women could tear theirs apart."
For this, I will never be able to look in your face, out of shame.
© 2005 Copyright Norma McCorvey - All Rights Reserved
Just imagine bearing that immense weight of feeling responsible for 63+ million aborted children. But Norma McCorvey found God’s forgiveness. If she can, any of us can.
And if there is a young woman out there, feeling and thinking the way I did back then, please, talk to someone other than who you are talking with now. Your life is not over if you have your baby. Talk to someone who cares, not just for your baby, but for you personally. (See this post’s "this, this, this, this" links for just 25 such places in the U.S.) The people who are pro-life but “anti-Nasty-Old-Man” are standing legally in those streets multiple times a week, offering that care and sustenance for you and your baby. Ignore the hateful old man or old woman with gory pictures, walk right past them, and speak to those others who do care for you. Their voices and their love are often drowned out by that old hurtful, angry breed, but hopefully by 2024, God forgive me, the latter have passed on by now and no longer are there to scream at the women going in. Those hurtful, hateful, fake “pro-lifers” and the pro-choice “blah-blahers” don’t really care for you and will probably never see you again. If the hateful unhelpfuls, or anyone else who condones or uses violent or scare tactics in the pro-life issue, really cared about you personally, they’d never use such tactics ever in the first place, and they’d be down on their knees asking you for forgiveness.
The ironic thing? I myself was an “illegitimate” baby, born “out of wedlock.” I was adopted at age two months and never knew my birth mother, who gave me the greatest gift I could ever have: my life, even if it was with another couple capable of taking care of me. I knew this, from as long as I can remember. You’d think that would’ve stopped me back then from making the wrong choice. My fear was too great then. All I could think of was myself. And now, every day of my life, I will be haunted by that.
I know that my mom, the mom who adopted me, felt towards me the same emotions that this poem conveys. If you cannot or don’t want to keep your baby yourself, you have the very great power to allow someone else to feel this way about your baby, if you “choose life.”
My Own Child
I did not plant you, true.
But when the season is done,
When the alternate prayers for sun
And rain are counted,
When the pain of weeding
And the pride of watching are through,
Then I shall hold you high,
A shining leaf, above the thousand seeds grown wild.
Not my planting, but by heaven, my harvest,
My own child.
~ Author Unknown