TRUTH revealed: ABORTION HURTS WOMEN

 by Darlene Wood-Harvey

I am speaking to you today because ABORTION HURTS WOMEN. It’s taken me over 34 years to be healed, strong and brave enough to share my story.

In 1973, as a 22-year-old, naïve and unsuspecting college girl, a long way from home. I hung out with nice, but amoral people who drank alcohol and were involved in pre-marital sex. I went along with the crowd and the consequences were my getting pregnant, although I didn’t know it at the time. I was too proud and independent to ask my family for help. I ended up at a "free" Planned Parenthood clinic (PP). They did a test and told me it was "positive." PP told me "it" was “only a blob of tissue” which could easily be removed for $200 (cash).

Physical Cost of Abortion

When I arrived for the “procedure,” the man entered the room and said something about giving me a shot and that I would hear a sound like a vacuum. He did NOT tell me about the horrible cramping and pain I would experience. I was awake through the procedure and experienced excruciating pain. I was crying and did not understand what was happening. I’ll never forget the pain and the noises coming from the tubes going out of my body. Everything went silent. The "doctor" turned away as he said I could rest a few minutes and leave by the back door. Immediately after the abortion, I felt nauseous, had sharp pains, experienced a lot of bleeding and weakness-too sick to sit. I was traumatized. This was my first gynecological experience. To this day I have trouble going to see a gynecologist.

The Cost of Infertility

During the following months, I STILL experienced severe pain and bleeding. I did not trust Planned Parenthood, so I went to a doctor who told me what the "procedure" was…an abortion! He also told me that PP had put an IUD inside me WITHOUT my knowledge or consent! I felt violated, betrayed and angry! I demanded the IUD to be removed, which was very painful. The doctor said the tissue damage and scarring in my uterine lining from the abortion and IUD may cause me to be childless. Planned Parenthood’s abortionist killed my only child and I am childless.

Emotional Cost of Abortion

At this point, I hated myself. I made bad decisions for my life. Nightmares filled my life. I became a workaholic and a near alcoholic. About three years after the abortion, I suffered from low self-esteem, physical pain and many other symptoms including panic attacks, short-term memory loss, debilitating fatigue, isolation and suicidal depression. I thought I was going crazy! I saw a psychiatrist. He told me I wasn’t crazy, but that I was suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome. The hell and reality of remembering the abortion started in the early 1990’s and continued until March 2008. Abortion cost me my womanhood.

The Cost to Women's Lives

Thank you Father, Son and Holy Spirit. I am now forgiven and set free and active in helping other women to NOT make the same mistake I made! The most important thing about abortion that I think people need to know is that abortion is not the answer to problems. Abortion creates problems. Women need to SEE and HEAR THE TRUTH ABOUT the destruction of ABORTION and how it kills their unborn children. Women need love. Abortion destroyed what made me a woman. Abortion wreaks havoc on women’s lives - it is NOT a safety net, but a HEALTH HAZARD!

Conclusion

I regret my abortion. Women deserve better than lies – they need Truth. With God’s help, I’ll defend TRUTH. I choose both the woman and her baby whose heart is beating at four weeks! I AM SILENT NO MORE. Thanks be to God - there is help and hope for hurting post-abortive men, women, and families through His Grace and Mercy.

 Immediate Help Here

Can We Heal Society?

We heal headaches, the flu, and even cancer.  But can we help heal society?  Illness is not unique to individuals.  There are social ills as well.  As healers, can we truly make a difference in society?  

Murder, rape and robbery.  What cause such violence?  What if we looked at violence as a sad "symptom" of a larger social imbalance?  Perhaps violence is an easy-to-see "inflammation" that accompanies a harder-to-see problem within society.  Like any illness, the symptoms are usually more visible than the cause itself.  

Illness within our own body usually comes from a variety of complex causes.  Poor nutrition, stress, contagion might all combine to create illness.  Likewise, social ills are caused by a complex combination of causes.  So what causes violent behavior?  Perhaps harming another becomes easier when we undervalue human life.  Is the human existence considered something sacred?  Or is it something lowly and innately soiled?  In general, do we feel connected and linked to our neighbors, as part of a single whole?  Or are we separate entities, foreign, individual beings?  History defines us in certain categories, where people of "other" categories are separate.  Biases for race, religion, nationality and gender have all created "us" versus "them" over the centuries.  This separation can be as fancy as political foreign policy, or as simple as the competitive games we teach our children, where one side plays against the other.  We create opponents instead of partners.  We score points over one another, instead of working together, as one, for a common goal.  The games in life may change as we grow up, but how we treat the other players sometimes stays the same.  

Violent behavior often erupts, like a pressure cooker exploding when people become frustrated.  What causes such frustration?  What natural parts of life have been choked off, stifled to create the type of pressure that causes someone to lash out?  This frustration can come from large-scale social pressures like poverty or prejudice, or can be as simple as the frustration we all have felt on a lonely night.  

Repeat offenders show that jails are only temporary band-aids.  (They wipe the nose, without curing the cold.)  As healers, can we diagnose the causes of social ills, and not merely treat the symptoms?  Can we send our magical energies (as well as tangible deeds) towards things that weave us all closer together, rather than those that divide us farther apart?  Can we share the things that make each other's life full of blessing and joy, rather than full of anger and frustration?  While no one person can change it all, we can each look for solutions in our own personal lives, with the people we affect every day.  Can we help heal society?  The patient's life depends on it!  

Lonnie Wolfe