A 47-year-old Barbados woman recently lamented the emptiness in her life left by the two abortions she had as a young woman.
“Each time I hear a child laugh or see children playing, I regret not having any,” the anonymous woman told Barbados Nation on Jan. 2.
The woman had two abortions. In both cases, she said other people influenced her decisions. When she was 17, she said her mother “made the decision for me.” When she got pregnant again at 23, her partner found out and immediately left her for another woman, she said. Interestingly, years after the abortion, her aborted baby’s father reconnected with her and helped her to secure a loan to pay for her education – an act that she believes was motivated by guilt about their unborn child. She said she and the man now are friends.
“Now, if I had ignored his attitude and taken that pregnancy to term, we would both be proud parents,” she said. “But none of us could see the future. We never could have imagined back then that we would be so close today.”
Her story continues:
I truly regret that I did not have at least one child to leave all that I have worked so hard for. It’s not easy knowing that as you grow old, and friends pass on, that there is no one there to take care of you if the worst happens.
… I guess that’s the irony of life – something comes your way and you reject it; but when you want that same thing later, it never comes your way again.
My two closest friends and I have gone through the same thing, and when we get together all we do is sip wine and laugh at how our lives have turned out. Each of us say that had we known how empty our lives would have been now without a child, we would have brought ours into the world.
Unfortunately, each of us is way past that age that we can have a child now. I am 47 and they are 48 years old.
CLICK LIKE IF YOU’RE PRO-LIFE!
This guilty feeling is why I decided to talk about my biggest regret. Young women need to hear from people like me who have walked in their shoes, did what we were told, but now are unhappy because of it.
While the woman said she believes abortion should be allowed in rare cases, her advice to other women was, “Avoid them at all costs.”
Her story echoes the heartache many women have shared after their abortions. Like her, a large number of women have been coerced or forced to have abortions by parents or partners. Many women also have turned to abortion out of desperation after their partners abandoned or refused to support them and their child.
In May, a Harvard University student shared the haunting pain of her abortion after her boyfriend broke up with her.
She said: “All I desperately wanted was to have my boyfriend back. I wanted him to hold me and let me cry into his chest, for him to tell me that everything was okay even though it wasn’t. But by the time I found out the truth, it was too late to get him back. He had started dating another girl two months after we broke up. I couldn’t tell him. I couldn’t tell anyone.”
After the abortion, the student said she could not stop screaming. More than a month after her abortion, she said, “… on the inside that screaming hasn’t stopped.”
Abortion advocates tell women that an abortion is a safe and simple procedure, much like having a tooth extracted; or that there will be no long-term side effects and their life will go back to normal. However, studies show that over 65% of women who have abortions suffer from post-abortive syndrome, 31% have health complications, and post-abortive women are six-times more likely to commit suicide than women who give birth.
Debby Efurd, who had an abortion at a Planned Parenthood not long after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on Roe v. Wade, said the abortion industry betrays pregnant women in crisis and their unborn babies.
She summed up the abortion industry’s motives in one sentence: “When I walked into their clinic in 1973, Planned Parenthood didn’t see a woman needing help … they saw dollar signs.”
