My Story...
My Story...
Posted 01.11.2006
It was 1976. I had just been released from active service in the military, met a girl and quickly fell in love. I wasn’t in the church then. I’d grown up in the free-world of the sixties and seventies, as she had, so it wasn’t a problem for us to take up as man and wife. I didn’t think I was ready for fatherhood, but when she told me we were expecting, I was ready to accept responsibility. I had mixed feelings about pro-choice. I never felt that choice was a license to kill. I believed, as I do now, that pro-choice was going to be interpreted as a license to kill, because I believed that life begins at the moment of conception.
She was uncertain about motherhood, but seemed settled with her pregnancy. That is, until I noticed that she was becoming increasingly troubled. She would not discuss, nor share her thoughts. A few weeks later she went out of town for a week, to “visit my mother,” she said. I knew something was wrong. When she returned she seemed distant and looked unwell. When I asked her what was the matter, she angrily blurted out that she’d had an abortion, and that it was a boy. I was horrified. Our conversation escalated into argument. She’d committed murder in my eye, just as surely as if she’d pulled the trigger. She said she chose the abortion because she didn’t have time for any kids... especially mine. I was devastated. My... son! I grieved. Alone. I blamed myself. I’d been careless and irresponsible. I’d given in to lust, I’d... I began to withdraw.
Our relationship quickly dissolved. She had excised me from her life as coldly and easily as she’d rid herself of our child. That summer I was stricken with a severe attack of appendicitis, and spent two weeks hospitalized. Two days after my return home, she attacked me with a heavy carafe. She didn’t harm me physically, but the mental anguish was more than I could take. I packed my belongings and moved out. I began to drink heavily, ignoring the counsel of what few friends remained to me. I sought peace in oblivion, and spent most of that year in spectacular 3D: Drunk, Drugged and Depressed.
Then one day I saw my self in the mirror. I didn’t know the man I saw there, but I knew that I didn’t like what I’d seen. She moved out of state, and I never saw, nor heard from her again. Adding to my burden? I don’t know if she survived the experience, or if she was taken by abortion related breast cancer. I found a church, and found some answers. And so, I began my long ascent from the abyss. I found my forgiveness in the sacrifice made by the Lord for me in the form of Jesus. In that acknowledgment, I found an amazing strength. I moved to another state, at my beloved sister's invitation.
The truth of the abortion became a dull throb in my heart. But the pain and damage didn’t just fade away, it became a deep-seated sense of emptiness, loss, and un-fulfillment. It was only by becoming involved in my sister's work many years later that the fountain of sadness that had been consuming and destroying me came to the surface. I recognized a burden that I could finally place at the feet of the throne. Now I find that there is a purpose to what I have suffered. My having borne the experience of abortion allows me to share and counsel others from a familiar place. I pray that I can help keep someone from going to the terrible places that I have been, and help them share in the peace that I have found.