"It's time. It’s time to share my secret, and I’m full of sadness. It’s been at least 38 years and I still wish I could undo that choice that I made on that horrible day when I killed my baby. Oh, how I wish someone had told me, it’s a life! This is your baby! Give that child a chance to live!
I want to share my story so that maybe even one person that reads it will change their mind about abortion, that maybe one young woman will keep her baby because she will hear how painful it has been for me to know what I did all those years ago, that I have regretted that decision ever since the day that I made it. I finally told my four grown children just two years ago that they have a sibling that they did not know about, that I chose to snuff out that life because I was afraid of what others would think, I wasn’t married and I was ashamed and scared. They cried. I told them individually, one at a time because I could not bear to have this conversation with more than one of them at a time, it was too hard and the scar still hurts me and now I had to see it hurt them, too.
My abortion, the killing of my first baby, has informed my belief that abortion is fundamentally immoral and wrong. I am outraged that at 17 I could go into a clinic and without any counseling or information, kill my unborn child. I don’t remember all the details of that day so long ago, but I remember that they were worried I might be too far along to do the abortion. I think I had to come back on another day after they confirmed the pregnancy. To be honest, I don’t even remember if they did an ultrasound, but guaranteed I was not offered to see the baby or given any information about the gestational age, what my baby looked like or anything that might have persuaded me to change my mind. So, I got dropped off by my boyfriend’s sister and endured that horrible procedure alone. After it was over, I had no one that I could talk to about it, but I knew what I had done.
How I wish it had not been that easy, that someone would have given me options, or that they would have told me about the regrets and pain that I would carry for the rest of my life if I made that choice. “It’s a woman’s right to chose”, “It’s not my womb”, “My body, my choice”, these all sound so plausible and reasonable but the voice of the unborn child is not heard, there is no concern that basic morality tells us that this is murder, that we don’t have the right to take the life of another, one who is completely innocent. We also have turned a deaf ear to the thousands of women who have gotten an abortion and suffer with regret and anguish over that decision.
I lost a lot of myself on that fateful day over 38 years ago, I lost a lot of my future. I will never know the potential that child had, the grandchildren they may have borne me. So much was lost and I didn’t know." - Ramona