Life Stories

Deirdre's Story of Regret

August 1977--I was 16 and I was pregnant. I knew this because I had gone to the local Health Department for a free pregnancy test and they had called me back that morning. The counselor on the phone asked me what I was going to do. What was I going to do? I had just began "experimenting" with sex. I wasn't supposed to get pregnant. That happened to other people, not me. I answered the counselor, "I don't know, maybe an abortion. I just don't know." The counselor picked up on this statement and offered to make an appointment for me at a Dallas abortion clinic. I agreed. I was never counseled towards anything, or offered any alternative other than abortion. My abortion was publicly funded.

I felt sad and empty, as if a part of my soul had been taken away.

As I look back at my post-abortion life, I realize that so many of the mistakes that I made and created for myself were due to the subconscious image I had created of myself, I had killed my own baby. How could anyone love me when I couldn't love myself?

I began to drink heavily and use drugs. I had severe depressions in which I contemplated suicide. I had, and still have, horrible nightmares involving babies and people trying to kill me. I still get depressed and cry a lot. I pray at night that God will let my baby know that I didn't kill him because I hated him. I long to hold him so much now that it hurts, and I want him to know that.

I have spent many years trying to push the memory of what I have done to the back of my mind, but it won't stay there. I have constantly compared my dead child to what he would have been doing had he lived. I understand that most women who choose to abort experience the same feelings. My child would have been in first grade this year. It's very hard for me to look at a first grader.

I have shed many tears over the last few years and now I'm angry. I'm angry at myself, my family, the abortion clinic, their counselors, the doctors (who can commit murder on a daily basis), and most of all I'm mad at my government, who prints "IN GOD WE TRUST" on our coins, yet has legalized the daily painful, violent slaughter of the youngest members of our society.