Three women have opened up about their past abortions and how they eventually forgave themselves after struggling with indescribable emotions and, in some cases, addictions.
Last month, thousands of pro-lifers from across the globe braved the cold and snow to attend the 51st annual March for Life, where the theme this year was "With Every Woman, For Every Child."
The theme emphasized the movement's dedication to uplifting pregnant women so that no woman feels alone before and after her pregnancy.
For those who have had an abortion, many women have described feeling as if abortion was their only option at that moment.
Women who spoke with The Christian Post discussed how they found healing after their abortions and have been inspired to help other women facing similar situations they experienced. The following pages highlight their stories.
Catherine Glenn Foster never thought much about the topic of abortion until she found herself unexpectedly pregnant at the age of 19 and in need of help.
Alone and scared, she eventually sought answers from Google, which directed her to an abortion facility in Georgia near her school.
Foster was a sophomore in college at the time, and she learned that she was pregnant after her school's Christmas break ended. The abortion happened in February 2001 at a clinic outside of Atlanta that is no longer in operation.
"In a way, it was like any doctor's office," the former president and CEO of Americans United for Life told The Christian Post in an interview. "But in another way, it was like, of all places — places where women are trying to decide, this is where women are needing counseling — it was odd how alone we all were."
Before the abortion, Foster was walking on campus one day in her boyfriend's oversized sweatshirt when she suddenly thought of the name Maggie for her unborn child. She does not know how she thought of that name, as she never learned if the baby had been a boy or a girl.
"I'm walking around campus, holding my stomach and just talking to her," she said. "I was comforting myself and my child, saying, 'It's OK. We're going to get through this. We'll be OK.'"
Foster hadn't decided what she wanted to do, and although she called the facility looking for information, she believes that the staff went ahead and booked her for an abortion anyway. Her boyfriend and the father of her child took her to the appointment, and while sitting in the waiting room, the pair could hear the other women discussing their previous abortions.
"And I remember there was one woman who had been there eight times," Foster said. "Most were more on the two to three range. I seemed to be the only one who was there for her first."
When the staff called Foster into the back room, she said they did not allow her boyfriend to accompany her, which she thought would've been helpful to have him there due to how scared she was at the time.
While lying on a table, Foster recalled craning her neck to try to see her baby as the facility performed an ultrasound with the screen turned away from her. When she asked to see the screen, she said the employee conducting the ultrasound refused, saying it was against the clinic's policy to allow her to look.
At first, it seemed that Foster was not far enough along for an abortion, as she was only in the first few weeks of her pregnancy. The pro-life advocate told CP that she took this news as a sign that she was not meant to have an abortion, but then the clinic employee checked again.
"She said, 'Oh, I was wrong. Actually, you are far enough along, but just barely,'" Foster remembers the clinic employee saying. "'So, it's fine. We can go ahead and do it today.'"
"It just suddenly hit me: This is not what I want; this is wrong," she continued. "This is a life, and at that point, I started to feel a heavy weight. And the doctor came in and was starting to get ready, and I said: 'This is not right for me. I just want to go; you can keep the money. I'm going to go and figure something else out."
As she tried to stand, she said the female clinic employee who had been sitting next to Foster continued to hold onto her hand as the doctor attempted to conduct the abortion. Foster said she kept trying to leave but the woman holding her hand called for backup.
"These three other people showed up, and they ended up holding me down," she said. "One on each arm, one on each leg; they just held me there."
According to Foster, as the staff held her down, the doctor continued prepping her for the abortion. She is not sure of the exact moment when she started to scream, but when she did, Foster said that one of the clinic employees placed a hand over her mouth.
"I just remember hearing the sound of the machine and trying to scream and wanting to escape," Foster said. "And then, by the time it was over, I guess I should have been angry or something, but I was just defeated."
"I felt like the life was just sucked out of me, too," she added.
The staff brought the then-teenaged Foster to the recovery room, where she finally let the tears fall. After they provided her with a drink and a cookie, Foster said the abortion clinic employees told her it was time to go, but she didn't want to leave. Foster wanted to stay because, at that moment, her one solace was that she was in the same building as her deceased unborn child.
Eventually, she said the staff brought Foster's boyfriend in from the waiting room to take her outside of the clinic, and he loaded her into the car. There was silence as the pair drove back to campus, and Foster said she also cried during the drive.
Returning to campus, Foster retreated to her dorm and wept, and she remained there for at least a couple of weeks. One month after the abortion, the sophomore finally told her mom what had happened. She had been afraid to tell her mom, who had mostly raised Foster on her own, that she was pregnant, thinking that the revelation would disappoint her.
She said her mother helped her find counseling through a pregnancy center in Johnson City, Tennessee, called Agape Women's Services. According to Foster, she is still friends with the counselor she met through the pregnancy center to this day.
As for her boyfriend, the couple's relationship ended one year after the abortion. After the abortion, the baby's father recognized the experience had been traumatic for Foster, but she said it just wasn't a good relationship, and she broke things off.
Eventually, Foster graduated college, started working, and obtained a master's degree. However, things changed for her after she attended an orientation on healthcare law when she began law school.
"I'm sitting there, and I just get one of the clearest calls that God has ever put on my life," Foster said. "It was just: 'You are here in law school to help women like you with babies like yours. You're here for humanity; you're here for the vulnerable, the disenfranchised."
In a time when pro-life advocates are considering how to best move forward following the reversal of Roe v. Wade, Foster contended that the movement was not ready for the Supreme Court to reverse the 1973 ruling that legalized abortion nationwide. However, she added that no one is ever prepared for change.
"People are often unready for a child; even when they think they're ready, and it's a planned child, they're still often not ready," she told CP. "It's not a perfect time, but it's a blessing because human life is always a blessing, even when it does not feel like it."
Regarding whether the pro-life movement should pursue a federal 15-week abortion ban or focus on passing laws at the state level, Foster called on pro-lifers to pursue every possible front. The pro-life attorney also held up Idaho's abortion law as an example of what she would like to happen in every state.
"I want a federal constitutional amendment that protects life," she said. "I want to pursue all of these things; however, we need a game plan."
"We have to be very cautious," Foster added about the passing of pro-life laws. "We have to make sure we have the funding, the financing, the messaging, all of that in line."
Deborah Tilden remembers the now-closed Lovejoy Clinic in Portland, Oregon, where she had an abortion, was "cold," with staff herding women from one room to the next as if it were a "cattle call."
Tilden told CP she was 18 years old and engaged to be married to the father of her baby when she had the abortion. Tilden's fiancé had returned to Alaska, and she was still in Oregon when she learned that she was pregnant in September 1980.
"We had a brief phone call, and the solution was abortion," she told CP. "He sent me the money — it was $300 at the time — and we were just going to cover up our little secret. You know, back then, people weren't talking about abortion healing; there were no pregnancy resource centers. And people weren't talking about it, about the aftermath."
The couple told a small group of close friends about the pregnancy but kept it a secret for the most part. As Tilden explained, she was a church girl at the time, and she was afraid of what could happen if others learned that she was pregnant.
"There was a couple in our church who were several years older than me who had been engaged, and they became pregnant," the post-abortive woman remembered. "And the pastor put them in front of the entire congregation and exposed what they had done."
The memory of what happened to that couple made Tilden fearful that the same thing would happen to her if anyone from church learned that she was pregnant.
On Oct. 10, 1980, Tilden went to the Lovejoy Clinic for an abortion. She told CP that she was around nine weeks pregnant at the time.
"You go into these abortion clinics, and they prey on fear; they prey on your vulnerability," Tilden said. "'Nobody has to know; it's not a baby yet; it's just a blob of tissue. Life can get back to normal."
She recalls sitting in a white room with the blinds drawn and the sound of the women beside her quietly sobbing as the staff shushed them. Tilden told CP that the abortion facility employees were trying to keep everyone quiet as they moved them through the process.
"It was just very cold," she said. "It felt like it was a cattle call. It was just a room full of women, and they kept moving them down the hallway to where the procedures were done."
Tilden never consulted with a doctor until he came into the room to conduct the abortion. After it was over, Tilden said that she felt as if she were in a fog. She also recalled that the facility never followed up with her after the abortion was done.
"I really just shut down emotionally," she said about how she felt post-abortion. "There was just a lot of self-destructive behaviors for about the next seven years. Drugs and alcohol, you know, just things to cope. I became obsessed with exercise, and I would spend three hours at the gym."
She eventually married her fiancé, and for the next 23 years, neither one of them spoke about the abortion. The couple went ahead with planning their wedding after the abortion, but, according to Tilden, there was this block between them, and they nearly divorced during their first year of marriage.
"We had no understanding whatsoever that it had anything to do with our abortion," she said.
The couple lived in Carson City, Nevada, for four years, and Tilden shared her abortion story with a pastor and another church friend who wanted to start a program for post-abortive women in the church.
During a meeting with the pastor's wife to discuss starting an abortion-recovery program through the church, the pastor's wife referred Tilden to Beauty for Ashes. The program is a retreat for post-abortive women to find healing from their abortion experiences. Tilden attended the retreat in 1999 to gain insight into how to operate an abortion healing program.
"I wept the entire weekend," the post-abortive woman recalled. "I thought it would be very different, but, you know, God sometimes has to set things up for us to walk through the doors of something."
While she did not start an abortion recovery program through her church, Tilden ended up participating in Beauty for Ashes four years in a row after that first retreat. The final year that she went, Tilden brought her husband with her, and the retreat served as a restorative weekend for them both.
Around this time, Tilden was introduced to the Silent No More Awareness Campaign, a pro-life group that helps post-abortive women share their abortion stories. She formerly served as an Oregon Regional Coordinator for the pro-life group before moving to Montana. She is the co-creator of LifeVictory Coaching, a program that helps clients realize their full potential.
In 2002, Tilden and her husband were living in Sacramento, California, and Tilden would eventually share her abortion testimony on the steps of the California state capitol.
Her healing journey continued when, afterward, the director of the Sacramento Pregnancy Resource Center approached Tilden and invited her to attend a Forgiven and Set Free post-abortion Bible study.
"When you look at the process of going through the healing from an abortion, I felt like I was just a caterpillar crawling on the ground, just barely existing," she said. "But when you go through that healing, I felt like a butterfly that had been released to do so much more of what I was meant to do in the first place."
When Sheila Harper reflected on the facility in Tennessee where she had an abortion in March 1985, she said it smelled like vomit. She remembers sitting in a room filled with girls all waiting to have an abortion. They all wore hospital gowns, with some sitting on the floor of the cramped room.
At the time, Harper was 19 years old and eight weeks pregnant. She told CP that she must have learned about the pregnancy a month before the abortion. The father of her child, who had begged her not to abort, did not take her to the facility. Harper was brought there by a female friend who was a year older than she was.
"She told me that abortion was no big deal, that she had had one at 15," Harper said. "And that was part of the reason why I justified the decision, because I thought, 'Well, if she did it at 15 and was OK' … that's what kept going through my head."
Harper can remember the day of her abortion as if it only happened yesterday. When she arrived for the appointment, Harper said she gave the facility a fake name, and the staff didn't ask for any identification. She remembered paying $250 for the abortion, saying the facility only dealt with cash.
"They told me that I would get some counseling, and I was so excited because I thought, 'somebody is going to tell me something else I could do,'" Harper said. "Because I never dreamed that I would end up at an abortion clinic."
The staff called her into an office, and Harper tried to find the words to describe the woman she met with, telling CP the counselor just seemed "dead." As soon as the door closed, Harper said that she burst into tears, and the woman asked her, "Do you want this abortion?"
"And I said, 'I don't know any other choice.' As I sobbed, I just kept thinking she was going to give me information that was going to help me," Harper said. "And she didn't. She wrote the number two on a card and handed it to me, and said, 'Go sit down out there. They'll call your number in a moment.'"
"That was it. That was the extent of my counseling," she continued.
Feeling as if there was no hope, Harper decided to go through with the abortion. By the time the staff called her back, the room where she was seated had filled up with other girls who were there for abortions.
She reflected on the other girls there that day, and Harper said that they were all like her, roughly the same age and about to have an abortion. As for the procedure itself, Harper said that it was "excruciatingly painful" and "humiliating."
When it was over, she said the nurses told her to get up and leave the room, but she couldn't even stand, let alone walk. Harper said that two nurses dragged her to the recovery room and laid her on a bean bag chair.
Two weeks after her abortion, Harper's boyfriend ended their relationship, and she told CP that she knew the breakup was because he couldn't look at her anymore.
"And I don't blame him," she said. "I deserved much worse."
After praying that one day she would have the chance to talk to him again and apologize, around 2010, Harper's old boyfriend reached out to her through Facebook. She sent him a message, apologizing and explaining how the abortion had impacted her life.
For years after the abortion, Harper endured what she described as "seven years of Hell," falling prey to drug and alcohol abuse, and her emotions spiraled out of control. After marrying in 1988, she told her husband about the abortion a year and a half into their marriage, and the couple felt they had discovered the reason Harper carried such negative emotions.
They looked through the phone book and found a counselor, but Harper said that speaking with a mental health professional only added to her stress. Around the third or fourth visit, she disclosed that she had an abortion. She said the counselor could not believe that Harper regretted the decision.
"And when she acted like that, I thought, 'I really am crazy,'" she said. "Because I was looking at this professional woman as someone who knows what she's talking about, and I thought I really must be crazy if I have these regrets."
One day in 1992, Harper was driving when she heard a commercial on the radio for a local pregnancy center, which was called AAA Women's Services but is now known as Choices. The commercial discussed a class for women struggling after an abortion, and after standing the center up at least three times, Harper found the courage to attend.
The class consisted of a Bible study, and as someone who had felt isolated after her abortion, Harper did not expect to meet anyone who could empathize with what she had gone through.
"But on the very first night of that class, all the people in that class were telling my story," she said. "And so then I realized I'm not crazy. This really is a thing. People do suffer after an abortion, and that's what got my attention and made me keep coming back to class."
"I was so shocked and thrilled to find people who understood what I was going through," she added.
Harper said she underwent a miraculous transformation due to the abortion recovery program, and she welcomed Christ fully into her life. While she knew God existed at the time of the abortion, she admitted that she had never paid attention to Him unless she needed to call on Him in troubled times.
While she was working with the pregnancy center, the facility where she had an abortion permanently closed its doors, and it exists now as the National Memorial for the Unborn.
Completing the healing program also filled Harper with a desire to give back, and she started teaching an abortion recovery class through the pregnancy center. In 2000, God placed a calling on her heart to begin an organization of her own, which she called Save One.
The nonprofit helps men and women who have been hurt by abortion tell their stories so that others who may be considering one will hear their testimonies and not go through with their decision to abort.
"I kept hearing people say at every class I taught if I could just save one unborn baby, I would be willing to tell my story," the nonprofit founder said about how she came up with the name Save One. "And I knew God was speaking to me through that phrase."
With the reversal of Roe v. Wade, Harper believes that it's crucial for the pro-life movement to be unified, regardless of whether someone approaches the issue from a religious or secular perspective.
"The unity causes an anointing that breaks the yokes of bondage; the word tells us that," she said. "And so, I feel like if we were more unified and accepting of each other and we weren't broken off working in all these silos, I feel like we would have a louder voice."
Originally published by The Christian Post
