Life Review: An apology to my aborted child… and her dad

This one isn’t easy. It’s also not an indictment on any woman who has had an abortion; it’s quite the opposite, actually. 

This post is not something I particularly want to write, but when the blog’s title landed in my heart, I couldn’t let it sit until I talked myself out of it.  

I had an abortion when I was 22 years old.

The abridged version backstory is, at age 19, I was nursing some pretty devastating heartbreak wounds after a split with the person I’d then believed I would marry when I graduated from college. In the throes of that emotional shootout, I vowed that if I wasn’t having his children, I wasn’t having anyone’s children.

I kept that vow… to the extreme of killing my child.

Keep reading. 

Sidebar: If you’re offended by my unfiltered language, it’ll be okay. For the record, I’m allowed to call my abortion what it was through my reconciled understanding of it. You know, free speech and all… it’s a permanent thing. And my lived experience is my lived experience. Plus, part of my healing has been to avoid softening what wasn’t softened for my child. I owe her that much.

A few years and one faulty condom after making the vow, I ended up pregnant. The second he said, “The condom broke,” I knew I was, unquestionably, knocked up. Don’t ask me how, but I knew it instantaneously. Six weeks to the day of that conception, I denied my child the right to live. 

The truth is, it took me years to regret it. At the time and age I was then, my professional future was my primary focus and I knew marrying the father of my child was not in the cards. We were neither in love nor committed. We were fairly new in each other’s lives and didn’t have a lot in common. I can’t say that if we were in love and planning a future together that I wouldn’t have made the same decision. I was that selfish. That self-focused. That spiritually blind to the way the word “legal” was a slick societal trap designed to numb my conscious mind – and my soul – to the effects of wanton sin.

My excusing of my abortion dripped, for years, with the perfunctory justification talking points:

My body, my choice.

It’s just a clump of cells.

I’m too young to be saddled with a kid. 

I have my whole life ahead of me. 

I was trying to practice safe sex. The condom broke. It wasn’t my fault.

All of that, in my mind, was evidence proving my absolution. Regardless of the fact that I was saved-saved and loved Jesus, my heart had hardened to the point of complete conviction-absence about what I’d done. 

How?

The vow.

And I did do something. I did it to my child. It wasn’t my body. It was my child’s body. I did it to a person created in God’s image. Despite my efforts to be reductive about it, that’s what happened. I took my child’s life.

That’s. What. Happened.

Fallen Scales

It wasn’t until I got a freelance gig doing marketing work on the 2019 box office-successful feature film, Unplanned that my feeble justifications were reduced to a fine powder.

(Fun fact: Robia Scott – “Pearl,” one of Prince’s muses from his Diamonds and Pearls album – plays the villain in the film, ya’ll. #wins #gains)

Don’t get me wrong; I’d long since repented by 2019. But the scales had not yet fallen from my eyes until, in the early days of my working on the film, God gently, mercifully showed me just how forgiven I am. 

Hear me. The scales falling didn’t have anything to do with me having a proper meltdown about the abortion. The scales falling was all about my receiving God’s forgiveness. It was a revelation of His agape (unconditional) Love.

With grace-cloaked Love, He showed me that He’d brought my forgiveness and redemption full-circle. He illuminated the fact that, although I’d had an abortion, He’d tapped me to work on, arguably, the most important (and definitely the most visible) feature film on the subject. 

He’d chosen me, a woman who had been blithely indifferent about death, to advocate for life.

I saw, with crystal clarity, God’s innately merciful nature and His deep desire to overtake me in it. It’s sweeter than any confection and more complete than any finish line. 

What’s really important to understand is that God didn’t wait until the scales had fallen from my eyes to position Himself squarely in the middle of the turmoil I didn’t know I was in. Sin is sneaky. The effects of it are, often, hidden… until they’re not. When the effects of it show up (and it always shows up), it’s usually an unexpected blindside hit. The consequences of sin can lie dormant for years, hidden under the cover of justification’s darkness and waiting for the most cruel moment to strike. 

Rebranding sin as something other than sin is one of the enemy’s favorite snares. It’s easy work for him.

Repentance – true godly sorrow without calling right wrong and wrong right – shuts the door. There will likely still be consequences, but they will have an expiration date.

Repentance is a gift, people. Engage.

God had exhibited His mercy to me from the second I’d made the decision to have the abortion. He was there in the room with me. He saw it happen. He knew I was going to do it before I was even born. As He grieved His child’s destruction of His child, He was gently caressing my forehead, laying the foundation for me to, eventually, realize what I’d done and forgive myself. He was protecting me from the self-loathing so many precious women suffer for years and the socially acceptable apathy other precious women invite into their souls as a coping mechanism. In the moment. In real time. God was there. I was, erroneously, relieved and felt, deceptively, “free” after I’d had the abortion. I wasn’t tortured about it. I didn’t have nightmares about it. I didn’t have any post-abortive medical complications.

That’s mercy.

In the post-abortive years before I’d repented, I didn’t face any public or private ridicule about it.

That’s mercy.

Once the scales had fallen, there was not one shred of condemnation in my revelation about what I’d done and for how long I’d been unphased by it. I had indescribable peace about reconciling how God had, masterfully, righted my wrongs (all of them; not just the abortion) through Jesus’ redemptive sacrifice over 2,000 years ago. And, even more masterfully, He manifested that redemption in a present-day, practical expression; a movie gig. 

That’s mercy.

Of course, as a post-abortive pro-lifer, I didn’t think I was the right person to have any level of responsibility working on that feature film but, as Andrew Wommack frequently says, “God hasn’t had anyone qualified working for Him yet.” 

Jesus’ death, burial and resurrection qualifies us. Word.

After all, the film, which was a box office win despite stunning opposition, is about a woman who’d had two abortions and, after witnessing one for herself (as the youngest Area Director in Planned Parenthood history), the scales fell from her eyes, she repented and has become among the most zealous and effective voices in the pro-life space. She’s a hero and a glowing confirmation that the whole “I will remember your sins no more” thing is a giant Truth. 

If God saw fit to repurpose her story into an evergreen tool (like this one) that continues to help thousands of women choose life and, for post-abortive women, help them receive his redemptive, healing Love, it wasn’t such a stretch to believe that He’d also seen fit to offer me the opportunity to function in a marketing capacity on the film. It was, without question, the most rewarding experience of my professional career.

My apology to her

I don’t know why I’m convinced my child was a girl. I just know. My dream was to have a house full of boys. I wanted five. I come from a family of five kids, and I wanted five, gigantic super-babies who would (beginning as toddlers) become elite athletes towering over me by age nine. I’m 5’1. Doable.

The vow I made at age 19 canceled that dream.  

I say that to highlight how a vow, once made, can be unrelentingly binding. 

So, if I could talk to my daughter, who is first God’s daughter, here’s what I’d say.

Sweet girl, I first want you to know that I adore you. Although we’ve never met, we know each other. I didn’t abort you for what some may consider an acceptable reason. For me, there is no acceptable reason. I was self-absorbed. I was influenced by lies: lies that convinced me you were an inconvenience rather than a treasure. Lies that whispered you were, very literally, an accident. Lies that persuaded me to believe that ending your life was my choice. 

Denying your right to live was not my choice to make.

My beliefs about you were wrong. I could easily blame my age at the time, the circumstances surrounding your conception or the fact that I did not have a future with your dad. None of it pardons me. Regardless of when, how and why you were conceived, you did not deserve the hand I dealt you.

Please forgive me. 

Now, after having experienced the boundless, loving forgiveness of your and my Father, I am indescribably grateful you were immediately received by Him on that day. You have never known one second of heartache. You have never known sadness. You have never known despair. You have never known loss. You’ve never stubbed your toe, burned your hand on the stove, been teased, had acne, been faced with a hard decision or broken up with a boyfriend. You’re in heaven.

And, for all the good milestones I prohibited you from experiencing, I thank merciful God for the comfort of knowing, unequivocally, that your experience in paradise infinitely surpasses any joy you could have ever known on earth. God has taken very good care of us both. Very good care, indeed. As only He can do, He has seated you with Him, without even a memory of what I did to you. He has also healed my soul to the degree that I am fully persuaded about His plans for me – they have not changed and they’re really, really good – and I will be reunited with you: as your mom. We will recognize each other immediately, and there will be nothing to reconcile. Our Jesus reconciled us on the tree. 

Thank you, daughter. Thank you for, without being on the earth, teaching me about why Love never fails. Thank you for smiling big when I worked on the ‘Unplanned’ movie. Thank you for celebrating why people call me ‘The Baby Whisperer.’ Thank you for loving on your grandmother the second she went Home in 2013 (I know she can't get enough of you). Thank you for understanding why I’ve received God’s forgiveness and why I’ve forgiven myself.

Thank you for being the very best part of me.

I can’t wait to meet you.

My apology to him

I told a friend I was writing this post, and he casually asked, “How many abortions did you have… just the one?” 

He was asking me how many lives I’ve ended. 

He was underwhelmed when I told him, “One.”

Swallow that. 

I mention that exchange, not in criticism of my friend, but to send a flare in the sky about how inching away from what God says about abortion has created crater-sized detachment from His broken heart about it.

* * *

When I told our child’s father I was pregnant, he asked me what I wanted to do. It was a progressive question but, when I told him I had no intention of having our child, he asked, “Are you sure?”

He asked several times in the weeks I had to wait until the doctor would do the abortion (six weeks). 

My response was hostile. I resented the fact that he’d even asked if I was sure. Rather than being grateful that, despite our recklessness and the nonexistent forecast of a future together, he was willing to assume full responsibility for our child. I didn’t care that he had the means to give our child a very good life. I’d made a vow at age 19, and everyone except one person had been automatically disqualified from fathering my children. That vow created the thick shell around my heart and closed me off to motherhood.

That vow disconnected me from my womanhood. 

I never considered him. What he felt, believed or wanted did not factor into the equation.

There’s a pervasive sentiment today that men are not only expendable, but obsolete. I wholly reject that notion. It’s a wicked perversion of equality, and an assault on God’s design for men in the lives of women. This agenda to render men as drooling, disempowered, guilty eunuchs is demonic and the people perpetuating it are shepherds for the devil. Period.

I said what I said.

The father of our child’s repeated query about whether I was certain I wanted to destroy the life we’d made together was not pressure; it was him being a man. One step further, it was God’s leading in him. In my ignorance about real male leadership, I haughtily shut him – and God – down. 

So, for my young-and-dumb years’ contribution to what is now a full-throated attack on manhood manifested as a global, spiritual and moral crisis, I apologize to the father of our child. I apologize for dismissing what was clearly a conviction of his to bring our child into the world. I apologize for canceling his instinct to take responsibility for his actions. I apologize for not yielding to his leadership in an undesirable situation. 

I was wrong. Dead wrong.