Dear Sir:
Please know that participants in the 40 Days For Life campaign at Mills Memorial Hospital this spring pray for everyone – the mothers, the fathers, the babies, family members, and the doctors and nurses who go in and out of the hospital.
Abortion not only ends the life of an innocent preborn child but profoundly affects the lives of the mothers, fathers, and their families.
While taking part in the campaign my friend Linda and I attended a workshop entitled “Healing Post-Abortion Trauma.” The fact that abortion really does hurt the mothers as well is often ignored.
Presenter, Susan Stanford-Rue is a trained psychologist who specializes in helping post-abortive women find healing and wholeness in their lives. She told some very moving stories including her own in which she chronicled her dramatic story of psychological brokenness after an abortion, how she was restored to wholeness and why she offers help to others in pain.
This workshop really affected me.
It gave me a new appreciation of the pain women go through when they have an abortion.
I was recently talking on the phone to a relative of mine about how busy I was. She asked my why and I told her that I was leading a 40 Days For Life campaign.
She knew what it was and we talked for a while about it. Eventually she said, “…did you know that I had two abortions?” I told her that I suspected that might be the case because I’d known she had a D and C. She then proceeded to tell me her story. She had been gang raped twice.
She was very young and there was no one who treated her with compassion. Nobody talked about what had happened to her. She told me that even today, over 40 years after her tragedies, when asked by strangers how many children she’s had she includes the two she lost to abortion.
I told her that I was so glad she had told me her story. She replied, “I’ve been wanting to talk about this for so long but nobody would listen.”
Besides the psychological harm there are also physical side effects to abortion. At the workshop in Smithers I watched part of a documentary produced by a pro-choice woman who believed that women should make an informed choice.
This turned out to be more difficult that she anticipated. She was blocked by groups who claimed to have the health of women as a priority. This film is called “Hush.” Our prolife group in Terrace hopes to show this documentary in the fall.
Finally, because we care very deeply for the mother and her child, our Terrace Prolife society has helped in the past and will continue to offer help to women in crisis pregnancies (this includes post-abortive women.)
Carol Woollacott, Terrace, B.C.
(To see the prior letter that prompted this response, click here