Today marks the 49th anniversary of Roe v Wade. For some it is a day of mourning and for many others it is a day of celebration. It's significance seems to be a little greater, or at least more on the forefront, this year because of the battle that's been going on in Texas over the heartbeat law that I believe just had a pretty solid victory in the Supreme Court. I don't actually know because in all honesty, the political side of abortion isn't where my heart is drawn.
I'm extremely pro-life, so I would love to live in a world where abortion wasn't even considered, much less a "right" that woman and men felt compelled to fight for, but I just don't think you will really find either the issue or the answers in the laws and politics. And frankly, when it becomes all about that, people get angry and dogmatic and the sanctity of human life just gets lost in the chaos.
I was just 19-years-old when I found myself in an unplanned pregnancy situation. The situation quickly became a crisis as more people were added to the equation. My then boyfriend (now husband of almost 31 years) and I had only been dating for a couple of months when I found out I was pregnant. He was unemployed, his dad had just followed his mom and little brother back east and he was struggling to find solid roommates and I was helping him make his rent payments. He was 1000% willing to step up, do the right thing, support me and the baby and even marry me, he just wasn't in much of a position to do it. The first time my parents met Neal was the day he sat at the end of my kitchen table when we told my parents I was going to have a baby. Needless to say it didn't go over well.
Thirty-three years later, now a parent of my own young adult children, I think I have a better understanding of what my parents must have been thinking and feeling that day. Truth be told, my mom wasn't surprised. I remember she had been saying things about me being pregnant for a couple weeks, and when I stopped denying it and finally confessed the truth at that table, I remember her looking across the table at my dad with that haughty "I told you so" look. My dad on the other hand looked like I had ripped his heart out, completely betrayed. I think I understand better now how your children disappointing you can feel a lot like betrayal. That's what my dad looked like-- betrayed. And he was angry. The conversation didn't go well, and despite our announcement that we were going to get married and have the baby, the response was pretty much a very clear "over my dead body," from my dad.
That was when the pressure began. My dad had it settled in his mind that I would have an abortion rather than "ruin my life." So began the constant pressure to move me in the direction he insisted was the only way. I remember a lot of heated discussions and screaming matches. One of them even ended with my taking a flung remote control to the chest.
I don't want to make my dad out as a villain. I understand now how a parent feels when they feel like their child is going to ruin their life. It's a painful and desperate feeling, and as much as he was angry with me and at the situation, he was also scared. He was certain that marrying and having a baby with a guy I barely knew, who he and my mom didn't know at all and who didn't even have a job, was a really, really bad idea. And as a parent now, I can't say I don't understand that feeling and perception.
Before I got pregnant, I don't think I even knew what an abortion was. I do know when I found out I was pregnant that abortion never even entered my mind until my parents brought it up. Naively, I think I even thought it was kind of cool to be pregnant. My (older) best friend growing up had gotten pregnant at 18 or 19 and married her boyfriend. By then they had two kids and life seemed to be going pretty well for them. I don't remember, but maybe that was part of why I never even considered a downside to being 19, unmarried and pregnant.
The pressure from my dad was constant. My mom was more silent than usual on the issue, but I knew she stood with my dad on what would be best for me. If I was around my dad there were one of two scenarios happening-- screaming anger and disappointment or absolute silent freezing-out isolation. He was either coming at me or cutting me off.
It was incessant. At the time, I not only lived with my parents, but I worked for them. I remember the day we were standing in the shop near the time clock when my dad broke the freeze-out long enough to turn to me with a searing knife of an ultimatum that pierced my heart. He looked at me straight in the eye and said to me, "If you have this baby, you will no longer be my daughter." And I knew beyond question, in the moment that he said it, he meant it.
That's what shattered my Pollyanna pretending about becoming a wife and mom at 19. I had to face the fact that Neal and I hadn't been together long enough for me to be sure about him. And I would have no family. I am an only child, and up until that point, I was a daddy's girl. His disappointment was unbearable. If my dad walked away, my mom would too. I would have no home, no job, no safety net. I finally felt like my back was up against the wall and I had no choice but to give in. I just didn't think there was any other way I could make it work.
My mom made the appointment, I insisted she pay the extra $250 so I could be asleep. Thirty-three years later, I can tell you with full confidence that that was the grace of God. I have worked with, counseled and ministered to so many women who were awake for their procedures and 20, 30 even 40 years later they are still haunted and have nightmares about the sounds of suctions and crunching of tiny baby bones. That's not sensationalism, that's just facts.
Even though I agreed to have the abortion, I was never on board with it. When I went to my pre-op appointment and they did the ultrasound, I saw my unborn baby, though that wasn't something I really understood until years later when I was pregnant with my first born, Jacob. Thankfully God had done a great healing in my heart by then, but it still brought a gravity to that memory that I'd never really had before.
I was ashamed of myself and my decision to have the abortion, so I lied about it. The agreement was that no one would know about it outside of my immediate family, not even Neal. He was working through a temp agency by then, so on the morning of the abortion I started the ruse with a phone call to him at work telling him I was having bleeding and cramps and I was going to go to the doctor to see what was going on. I can only imagine how helpless he must have felt that whole day not knowing what was going on.
I begged my mom the whole way to the clinic not to make me do it. I wanted her on my side. I wanted her to give me an out. She told me I didn't have to do it if I didn't want to, but if I didn't do it, I would have to face my dad-- alone. I already knew what that meant. He'd made that completely clear that day in the shop. I had to choose, have the baby, or have my family. And I did not have the foresight or faith to even consider the baby, all I could feel was the fear.
When we pulled up to the clinic, there were a lot of angry people outside, carrying ugly pictures, screaming ugly words. As my mom slowed enough to pull through the dip at the curd and into the driveway, a man came up to the window of the car and pointed straight at me and with anger and hate in his eyes, he pointed straight at me and screamed at me, "MURDERER!!" Suddenly, the place I least wanted to go became the safest place to be. Workers came from inside the clinic, put their arms around me and ushered me inside. I felt protected by them as they led me away from the chaos and hate.
Now, I need to say, I am certain many of the people outside the clinic that day were not angry, and were well-intentioned, and genuinely cared about me and my baby, I just couldn't see past the loudest and the angriest voices. The voices that rose to the top were voices of judgment and hostility, and they simply drown out any compassion and care I might have found there. I often wonder how things might have turned out differently if I had heard the right voices. I was looking for a way out after all, and perhaps if I had found a voice of hope, or an offer of help, I might have found the strength to make a different decision. I can never really know. Nor can I discount the way God used that decision I did make for my eventual good and for His glory. But please do not mistake that statement of faith as any kind of endorsement that for the decision to abort, or any encouragement that it turned out to be a good thing, because that just isn't so. There is no knowing what good or glory could have just as easily come out of that life being allowed to live.
My heroes from the clinic didn't remain heroes for long. The humiliation of the cattle call process of having an abortion was deeply felt. Traveling along like a lost sheep, following arrows on the floor barely covered in a hospital gown, looking into the faces of so many other women who looked just as conflicted as I felt was awful. Thankfully I remember only a little of the stirrups and the irritated doctor in the room where it happened, but I do remember waking up in recovery to the sound of anther woman's tears, whimpering as she cried out, "My baby, my baby..." And one of these same staff members who so kindly ushered us in to our "procedures" was now harshly and rudely reprimanding this woman to be silent in her regret and pain. Now the cattle call had become more like a cattle prod as we were all hurried to get dressed, get our cookies and juice (like we had made some sort of donation) and get gone.
It was almost three years before I came to terms with the decision I made that day. I lied to everyone that I had had a miscarriage. I spent those years angry and hostile, and oddly enough extremely PRO-abortion. I know it seems strange, but that was my response, I wasn't just "pro-choice," I WANTED other women to have an abortion. I think mostly because I didn't want to feel so alone. No one was bragging about "exercising their rights" back in those days. Abortion might have been a dark and dirty little secret for some, but for me it became a mission. I remember trying to talk a friend in an unexpected pregnancy into "joining the club." Thankfully she made a different choice, but I remember the way I LIED to her and told her how simple and neat the whole process could be, as I pushed down all the pain, loss, sorrow, shame and humiliation deep into my soul. It bubbled up often as anger and venom directed mostly toward my mother over the course of those next years, even while we planned my wedding and into most of the first year of my marriage.
It was the week of my 22nd birthday, just over 10 months after I married Neal, who still had no idea I had had an abortion that I had my first miscarriage. What a devastating day that was. In addition to being fully in support of other women having abortions, I was desperate and determined in my own life to get pregnant again and have a baby. I can't tell you how much I longed for it, and how deep the ache burned, so much so that I stopped taking birth control six months BEFORE I got married. And it hurt every day in the year and a half I spent trying to no avail.
Neal and I were at a couple's wedding shower the weekend before my 22nd birthday when my cramps from what I thought was a particularly heavy period got so severe he had to carry me out of the party and take me home. I suffered at home the rest of the weekend until I could finally get into the doctor where I was told I was in the final stages of a miscarriage. My heart broke, and I knew to the depth of my being that I was being punished by God, just as I believed at the time that I deserved to be.
My dad had to drive Neal to me at the doctor's office because I was simply too heartbroken to drive myself home. As I looked my dad in the eye that day, which I could barely do, I was the one who felt betrayed, but I think I saw heartache and sadness for me in his eyes. Neal did his best to care for me, but because he still didn't know the truth about our first child, he had no idea what pain and regret were really consuming me. It wasn't just that I felt sad about another baby lost, I felt guilty and responsible.
Thankfully, I can say now that that day was a turning point in my life. It brought me first to Christ, then to healing. It brought me to a place of confession to God and my husband. Neal too came to the Lord through my return to church. God did a deep and methodical healing in my heart and soul. He did some restoration too. Almost two years after that miscarriage Jacob was born, and after he was, my dad apologized to me for pushing me into the abortion, and even though I had by then long forgiven him and my mom and come to terms with my own sin and culpability in my first, (and by default second) child's death(s), it put a nice closure on that part of my relationship with my dad. I finally felt like a Daddy's girl again.
Now I have shared a lot more of my story than I meant to, but I wanted to point out the need for kindness and compassion on the subject of abortion. Too many Christians, including Christian leaders are so passionate about saving unborn babies, that their desperation turns their words and sometimes their tactics into destroyers of communication where what is needed is an invitation to be heard and understood. It's why I don't concern myself too much with the politics of abortion.
That's not to say I don't believe there isn't value in that part of the pro-life movement, people need to follow their passions, and trust the Holy Spirit in themselves and we need to trust also the Holy Spirit in one another. Just because I don't feel like that's the ground where I feel like I need to fight (though I DO VOTE pro-life) it does not mean God hasn't directed other people that way. What is important though, is wherever we are fighting, we need to remember who the enemy is. I can tell you with 100% assurance, it is NOT the mother considering abortion. It isn't even the politicians and judges who are pushing and proponents for "choice." It's not even the doctors performing them. The enemy is the devil, and the fight needs to be against all of his tools. There is a LOT of deception, not just women who have abortions for whatever justification they come to. A lot of abortion advocates are sincerely deceived in their passion to fight for a woman's right to choose, and there are a LOT of doctors deceived into believing they are actually doing a good thing by "helping" women by providing a way out of a crisis. The (little g) god of this world is a masterful liar, and just about all of us are buying into some lie somewhere, and in this area, there are so so many people who are fooled.
Abortion is a tool of the devil. It destroys lives, not just the unborn, but often the lives of the women who have the abortions. I have been to rallies and prayer vigils against abortion and I have seen angry women screaming in my face about the RIGHT to abortion. And I have looked at them and KNOWN them, because there was a time when I was one of them. A LOT of those women are post-abortive women who are trying to justify their decisions or numb their pain through activism, and now that it's actually fashionable to have had an abortion, and shameful to be against it, they just shout down that hitch in their souls all the more. A woman full of pain and regret that the "world" says shouldn't feel negatively about participating in an act that deep down at the core of their natural being just knows should never have been. Pregnancy is a life inside of you, and the untimely and unnatural cessation of that life does something inside of you. Even if it isn't recognized, something breaks. It's a deep spiritual hurt that stays with you. And I don't care how many women say that it isn't that way, I have seen too many battle with it. It's like a form of PTSD. Even those women who are having abortions repeatedly, I believe, are just trying to bury that nagging unrest that abortion leaves in a soul.
The sad thing is, abortion has just gotten easier in these days with chemical abortions-- like an at home kit. Even the morning after pill is meant to normalize the process. Laws that make it legal for minors who can't get their ears pierced without parental permission are given the "right" and responsibility to make life altering decisions for themselves. It isn't right. Who among us thinks a 15-year-old has the life experience and maturity to make those kinds of decisions? I certainly don't. And in states like California, Connecticut and Alaska there is no age requirement for parental consent for abortion at all. We're talking 10, 11 and 12 year olds here. (If you don't see it, trust me when I tell you this is an issue with child sexual abuse and sex trafficking. And no, it's not better that a girl in one of those situations has an abortion, because all it means is she has now been victimized twice.) But this is where we are, and then we tell them there is something wrong with them if they aren't OK with the process of abortion, and I think that's a lot to put on a full grown adult woman, much less a young girl that is only steps beyond being a child.
But the pro-life movement needs to remember that there is no way to save an unborn baby without reaching its mother. There needs to be just as much compassion for the mother as there is passion for saving the unborn child. You have to touch the one heart to save both lives. There is no reaching and protecting the baby alone, not even through legislation and politics. Now I'm not making the cliche about hangers and back room abortions. but I am acknowledging that at this point, it is highly unlikely we will legislate abortion away, even if there are victories like the heartbeat law in Texas (which only limits abortion, it does not eliminate it.)
The world has gone crazy these days, on so much more than the subject of abortion. At the center of all of the chaos is a lack of compassion and understanding. People aren't listening to one another anymore. Even within the church there is so much division and dissension, and a whole lot of anger and hostility.
I think a lot about the way Jesus interacted with people, women in particular-- the woman at the well, the woman caught in adultery. He met them not with judgment, but with compassion. He met them in their sin, their struggle and their hurt. That's the model that He left us with. I don't think it would be any different if he came upon a woman considering abortion, or a woman who's had one. I know that's not how He came to me. Care, compassion, kindness and forgiveness-- forget all the shortages on the shelves in our stores, this is where we are really lacking.
He left us with instructions to love one another. And I say this with full acknowledgement that this is a hard thing for me, at least beyond the subject of abortion, but we need to work harder and the act of loving one another, forgiving one another, caring for one another... even when we have to agree to disagree. They seem sort of cliche, but it's true, love the sinner and hate the sin. Don't judge and condemn the person just because you are rightly able to judge their sin. It doesn't define them. I am certainly grateful that my sin doesn't define me. "Murderer" is covered by the blood and the reality of "child of God," but even before I knew Him, He loved me, and the same is true of those people we find so hard to love. But we can do it, but only by His power and grace. The world could use more of both, and if you are His you are called to be a vessel of them. We all need to try a little harder to remember that and walk that out in His strength, one day at a time.
Blessings,
Diana
