I agree that most women think and think and think about having abortions. And it may be harder for Catholics. I once met a girl who had been raped and had become pregnant. She was prolife and Catholic. But she became so depressed about her horrific experience that she was hospitalized and was forcibly injected with anti-psychotic medications, which in turn (probably) caused extreme birth defects in her unborn child. She was Catholic and she was prolife and she was carrying a baby that modern science told her was going to be born dead or profoundly deformed. At this point she lost it completely and was again hospitalized. I don’t know what happened to her or her baby. It was like she had so much against her: the rape, the unwanted pregnancy, the high probability of deformity in her child. There was no easy answer here yet I would still say that abortion would be wrong in this case. This was a long time ago but I still think about her and pray for her and her child.
I am so sorry to hear about this. I came from a christian university that was extremely conservative. If a man and woman were caught having sex, both would be expelled. The problem is, not everyone was having sex where they’d get caught. Some women got pregnant from this, and would refuse to name the father of the child so that they BOTH didn’t get expelled. A lot of women would get booted, while the men were allowed to stay. It was a horrible injustice. But it made a lot of us think, and realize that there had to be SO many women on our campus who were getting abortions. We knew most of them were or at some point had been sexually active, the problem is they couldn’t tell anyone and get help. Even if you went to the school’s counsellor and said that you were pregnant, or you were seeking help after an abortion, they reported you and you were booted. It was like the gestapo. I remember my then boyfriend (now husband) and I were talking in the car in the parking lot about our commitment to wait until marriage (and we did, by the way) but we got on the topic of “what if we mess up and I get pregnant.” We sat in a stone cold silence for a while realizing that if we made a mistake and slept together and pregnancy resulted we found how suddenly both of us thought about abortion…and we are some of the most AVIDLY prolife people we know!! It made us realize how many chrisitan women are probably getting abortions. It was scary.
And yet the people I debated with said there has never been an adverse reaction to abortion. No one has ever been depressed about it. I knew that could not be true but at the time I didn’t know how to refute it. Now I do.
Every time I hear this, I absolutely lose it. I have to be honest, its the only thing that can be thrown out in a debate where I have to leave the room, leave the thread, what have you. My mother got an abortion when she was 15. I am ashamed to say that she never really told me this (before I found out about it anyway), but I found it in her diary that she had left open on a table when I was a teenager. Yes, it violated her trust, but because I learned that I was able to forgive my mother for what she has done to me over the years. See, I saw that she had written that, and I then read the whole darn thing.
See, my mom has been a raging alcoholic as long a I have known her. She had a very life threatening disease from drug use, she was abusive (physically) when she was drunk, and I am sorry to say, I feel she utterly ruined my childhood. I couldn’t have friends over, I was getting bruises from “running into doors.” that made teachers think I was a total ditz, and…well it was just awful. I was never able to forgive her for that, and I
hated her.
Then I read this entry. Apparently things for her were totally fine. Her mom was a little crazy, but other than that things were pretty average. When she was 15 she slept with a guy (big mistake, she admits) and got pregnant. Her brother (my uncle, who I have never got a long with) talked her into the abortion, and took her to the clinic. Every time she said she had doubts, he reassured her that having the baby (my SIBLING!!!) would ruin her life. Not long after she started using very hardcore drugs, sleeping with men for drugs, contracted 2 different STDs, and started staying drunk almost all the time. She tried to clean up a little when she met my dad, but it was only for a few years while she was pregnant with my brother and I, then she started back into the alcohol again. She had severe depression, anxiety, and a host of other metal problems.
I asked her about it not long ago, and she broke down in tears confessing that yes she had the abortion, and it has haunted her her whole life. She thought she had dealt with it, but even now about 35 years after the fact it still bothers her. I told her that it seems all of this was pinned right back at the time she got the abortion. She told me that she has no doubt that was the catalyst.
Abortion ruined my mom’s life. Which it turned screwed up my childhood and my brother’s. I have a sibling I will NEVER meet this side of heaven. Any time
anyone tries to tell me that abortion is good and doesn’t hurt anyone I have to leave. It DOES hurt, and it
destoys families. There has never been, nor will there ever be a greater evil than abortion.