When I met Jim I thought I found the right one. But I was careful. I went slow, and we had a courtship that lasted nearly a year. Jim was a good guy, but it would not have mattered if he had tried to persuade me to go beyond what we ought to do together. If he had tried, I would have immediately dropped him.
For I had learned that if a man really wants my best interests, he won't try to use me for his own benefit. And sex before marriage is just that.
It was an idealic wedding. All that I had ever wanted. My relatives and friends were there, and everyone was happy. There was no reason not to be, for we had done it right.
But four years before, it had been different. Cecil had asked for something I should not have given him. But I didn't want to lose him.
Since then I have discovered from talking to other women that it doesn't work out that way. Once men have gone the limit with you, they generally lose interest. They figure if you would do it with them, you must not be worth much.
Just as Cecil said afterward, when I told him I was pregnant. "Well it is probably one of the dozen others you have fooled around with!"
Yet he had been the only one.
I was in my last year of high school when it happened. I went to the school counselor and he sent me to a family planning agency downtown. I later learned those places are only abortion planning organizations. But I didn't know that at the time; I was too young.
The woman there told me that I must get an abortion right away and she would refer me. When I objected that it was my baby she was talking about, she replied it wasn't a baby but only tissue, and getting rid of it would keep me in school.
I was four-months pregnant when I walked into the abortion clinic. Everyone was impersonal and just wanted to get the job done. They led me to a room, and the doctor would not speak to me. He said to the nurses there, "Get her up on the table." A former worker in an abortion mill later told me that it is impossible for them to be warm, friendly, and caring,—for they know they are killing babies; they live with the fact all day and all night, too.
The man at the agency said it would only take a couple of minutes and there would be only a little pain. But when they started on me, it was the most painful thing I ever experienced! I screamed, and the doctor told the nurses to shut me up. One of them poked gauze in my mouth. I thrashed around, trying to get away from them, but they had me tied down. If I could have run out of there, I would have done it. The pain was intense.
I've talked with other woman since then and they tell me they went through similar horrors. I was not unique. The suffering that takes place in those mills is terrible. A former worker in one of the abortion clinics told me of a time when she was walking down the hallway and saw three people dragging a teenage girl into a room. She kept saying, "Please, I don't want to do this; please!" One was her aunt, another the doctor, and the third a heavy-set guy at the clinic they called "the counselor."
As I walked out of the room where they took my baby, I kept thinking of the blood on the floor and the empty buckets along the wall waiting to be filled with more babies. My agency friend said they send the women through as fast as they can. "It's all a money-making racket," she said. She knows a lot, and told me the doctors which switch from regular practice to abortions double their salaries, while cutting in half the number of hours they work each week. They can easily net $200,000 a year.
But I sure wouldn't trade places with them! Who wants to face the coming Judgment with all that blood of dead babies on one's hands!
After it was over, I couldn't sleep nights. I kept seeing that room and those people coming after me with stainless steel tools to cut me open.
Then I met Jim, and he was so kind to me. Not once did he try to take advantage of me, and I respected him for it. Girls, if the guy wants to take you all the way—drop him quick. He's no good, and even if you do marry him, he will be untrue to you afterward.
Well, I've already told you about the wedding. It was beautiful, and I am so thankful for Jim. But we discovered we could not have children. The family planning agency had not told me THAT part. Many woman who have an abortion are sterile thereafter—and can never have a baby. The abortion doctors injured them inside.
Jim took me to a medical specialist. He was a Christian and told me the facts: Because the mills run them through so fast, they are careless in their work and acute inflammatory infection of the uterus or ovaries occurs in 5% of the abortions.
Tubal pregnancies begin about 20% of the time in later pregnancies. Because the uterus was damaged, it does not send out the right hormonal signals, and the baby starts to grow in the tubes instead—so the hospital has to take all the female organs out to save the woman's life.
After pregnancy begins, the circular muscle at the cervix closes up tight (the cervix is the door to the uterus). But the abortionist slices through that muscle to get the baby out. This ever after results in a weaker cervix. So later pregnancies will result in premature births about 20% of the time, or second-trimester miscarriages.
But injury to the uterus also later causes other problems: subsequent pregnancies are twice as likely to result in spontaneous fetal death, damaged infants, or rupture of the uterus. (That's when the uterus breaks open during pregnancy.)
Of those women who previously had an abortion, 27% have complications due to infections; 9% require blood transfusions in order to save their lives at time of birth.
In my case it turned out to be sterility. The specialist told me that, normally, 10% of the women will be unable to have a baby. But, after having undergone an abortion, it is increased by 10-13%. He told me of a Czechoslovakian report that 25% of the women who abort their first pregnancy—are permanently childless thereafter!
I wanted that first baby, and they talked me out of it so they could get the money. And now I cannot have another one! Often I have wept half the night over this. I killed the only baby I will ever have!
Jim and I have gone to adoption agencies, but they tell us the waiting line is seemingly endless. They tell us the problem is that women are aborting their babies, instead of giving birth to them and then letting them be adopted out!
It makes me angry. I was only 18 then and didn't know much. Now I know a lot more: those men kill the babies, and in the process maim the mother. And they call it "pro-choice," "women's rights," and "more freedom for women", while they pocket the cash.
As a result of this whole problem, Jim and I became actively interested in helping other women in our area. We now work closely with the pro-life organizations. The clearing house for all of them is National Right to Life Committee, Inc., 419 Seventh Street, NW, Suite 500, Washington D.C. 20004. You can write them, ask for literature, and, if you would like, get on their mailing list. They can give you the names and addresses of other pro-life organizations, some of which are working locally in your area.
I met the former medical director of one of the largest abortion clinics in our state. She told me that the women are never told about adoption agencies and the fact that the child can be adopted out—and how it will save a human life—the life of her baby if she does carry it full term and then adopt it out. They do not tell her that there are Christian homes where she can go during those final months—paid by adoptive parents—if she does not want her friends to know about her pregnancy. Instead, they frighten her and rush her into an abortion. They want money, and that is all they are interested in.
Because of that fact, they do the abortions fast and often in a sloppy manner. When the woman goes into the clinic, she will not know who the doctor is. He may be an out-of-town "circuit-rider," who works in different locations on different days of the week. Because of this, he may not have admitting privileges at the local hospital. If there is a complication, he will not be able to admit her to the hospital for emergency surgery.
The women think they are getting good medical care, while in fact they may be getting the shoddiest of medical help from doctors who have no interest other than factory-line speed and their pay checks.
When a problem does develop, and the woman afterward continues bleeding because part of the placenta was left inside, or when infection develops in her womb because of unsterilized treatment in the clinic, they will tell her that it is her fault. They will frighten her, try to humiliate her, or whatever it takes to keep her from suing them for several hundred thousand dollars. They know that she is likely to win, especially if she afterward went to regular doctors for treatment. The medical reports and doctors' statements will tell the story.
How many times the woman has a retained placenta and requires yet another D&C operation to scrape out the womb again! Sometimes this extremely painful operation has to be repeated more than once. All because the abortion clinic did not do it right the first time.
Whenever a problem developed, the clinic may cover it over in its records. For example, if a young women is given a sloppy job, and as a result has to have a hysterectomy (the surgical removal of her uterus), the clinic will write "sudden uterine gangrene" on their records. Hysterectomies are appreciated at the clinics, and they will urge women with later complications to get one right away. Yes, it means those women can never again have babies, and, yes, it means they probably will have hormonal problems till they are fifty, but the clinic cares not. All that matters is that a hysterectomy has removed the evidence of what they did—the injured womb, the infection, the placental remains inside.
The former worker in one local abortion clinic told us that she got to the point where she could hardly sleep at night. One of her jobs was to look through the aborted remains, checking to see that everything had come out. Then at night she would dream about those little babies.
One day the manager of the clinic came to her and told her to "clean up her act or get out." She had told some of the women that they had "a baby," instead of telling them it was "merely tissue." She let some listen to its heartbeat, and this enraged the manager.
The situation got so bad that she quit the job. But she told me she would never forget the horror of what goes on in those places. "They really are chambers of horror," she told me.