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Personal Testimonies
Just before Christmas in 2001, the reality of abortion broke into my heart. I went to Tasmania’s Parliament House to pray while a Bill to change the abortion law was debated. I sat in the gallery, listened to the politicians, and prayed. I was there for hours. I witnessed parts of both the pro-choice and the pro-life protests outside.
When I think of that day, it still chills me. It was a summer day, warm and bright. The pro-life protest was a small line of people just outside the door of Parliament House. They stood silently, some holding placards of slogans or fetuses. The pro-choice protest was held later on the lawn of the Parliament House gardens. Speakers stood on the broad stone steps. Behind them were the historic sandstone parliament house buildings. In front were the ancient oaks and Hobart’s famous waterfront. Many professional looking and smartly dressed women stood on the smooth grass. They cheered together for speakers who said abortion was just a women’s health issue, entirely up to a woman and her doctor, needed to prevent backyard jobs, something that politicians should not have any role in. “Who has any right to tell a woman what to do?”
A pro-life friend watched the protest whilst sitting on the grass under the oaks. She told me that the protesters cheered over one woman’s abortion story. This woman had a child, then two abortions, and then another child. The sound of women cheering over abortion horrified me. It is one thing to believe abortion should be a choice available for women in difficult circumstances. It is another to cheer about it.
When I look back on that day, I see it as a milestone in my life. To use a clichéd phrase, it changed my life. Like the day five years ago my best friend lost control of the car we were travelling in and we drove into a rock face at 80km an hour. I had a crush fracture to a vertebra in my low back and have had chronic pain ever since. Like the day I decided to be a Christian. When the words “God loves you” became real to me after I had heard them all my life. What I saw on the day I visited the Tasmanian Parliament for the first time left me compelled to become involved in pro-life work. My day at Parliament left me with memories of even the smallest details. The mauve trousers I was wearing with the coloured beads along the cuffs; the sinking feeling I had when I realised that the pro-choice protesters were wearing mauve and purple.
For months afterwards I wept for the thousands of dead babies that have been killed in our land. I had nightmares about them bloody, dead, and broken. I desperately tried to forget, but I could not. I grieved for the loss of the potential of those children. Have we aborted someone who would have made great contributions to assisting the hungry or the downtrodden of the world? Have we killed a great man who would have become the Prime Minister of Australia?
This grief was a terribly lonely experience. In Hobart, the capital city of the state of Tasmania, I knew no one else who felt this way. Many church people would express their disapproval of abortion. Others seemed less convinced. No one I knew seemed to feel the horror and grief of abortion. I desperately wished I had never gone to Parliament House that day. That I didn’t know the reality of what was happening. I questioned whether my feelings came from God or the devil. I could not understand why God had afflicted me with this grief, when no one else seemed to feel it at all. I felt like there must be something wrong with me. I knew women who had abortions often suffered from grief, but why was this happening to me? I had never had an abortion.
Over the years my grief has eased. What once shocked me is no longer even surprising. Sometimes I feel almost numb and resigned to the reality of dead babies and the hard heartedness of abortion advocates. At other times the hurt comes sharply again. The focus of my grief has also changed. Now I grieve more for the women who go through abortion. Their stories inhabit my heart and bring tears to my eyes, even as I write this. I have come to understand that for many women abortion is not a decision of convenience, but of desperation and despair. I grieve more for them not because their loss is greater than that of the babies – but because they live to endure their loss. The babies lose their lives; the women’s lives are never the same again. As Melinda Tankard Reist wrote in an article for an Australian newspaper: “Of course a baby is for life, but so is an abortion.” If I once grieved over the deaths of babies with a heart-wrenching trauma that seemed like it would never go away, how much more crushing is the grief of these women? My grief was for thousands – theirs is often for just one. Yet how much greater their grief would be.
I still do not fully understand why God chose to impress me so vividly with the horror of abortion. I question his purpose for me in this. Often the idea of doing anything about abortion seems too hard and complex. I get sick of thinking about it. I get discouraged. Life would be easier if I could suppress, ignore, or underestimate the horror of abortion. Yet I now know that the Lord has called me. He does not want me to ignore abortion. He would not let me forget.
© Copyright 2002-2009 by LAF/BeautifulWomanhood.org
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