I liked this girl’s description of her abortion at 19. From Salon, which I put up front, since that ain’t no pro-life web site. This description here is my fear for every girl who is too young to have a baby, but too young to know that she’ll hit a point maybe ten, maybe 15 years down the line, when she’ll know what she did and regret it. I try, in fumbling, inadequate ways, to tell young audiences that this could well be the outcome. But maybe you need to actually have had an abortion for it to carry weight:
It won’t be until over a decade later, when I am well into the actual world of parenthood, frazzled and overwhelmed with love and impatience for the tiny creature I have created, that I will realize that if I had actually had a baby at age nineteen it might have been the very thing that would have kept me from the years and years of misery and destruction ahead of me. It won’t be until I am finally a mother myself, and not until my cheek rests against my child’s soft downy head, that I will realize the bleakness of what I did all those years before.
I heard a talk several years ago, given by a Baptist minister very active with crisis pregnancy centres and he said that having the baby was often the redemption for women caught in unplanned pregnancies. If they had an abortion, they usually returned to their lifestyle and it became more promiscuous; whereas those who had their babies “grew up” and matured; the baby did this for them. We don’t often hear that stated, but it is certainly true in the majority of cases.