A Great Opportunity to Help A Post-Abortive Woman

The woman sitting in my office had asked for help in dealing with an abortion she had over 20 years ago. She stated that she had not been able to put her finger on the deep sadness she had carried all these years. Then she attended a women’s conference and heard about help for women who had aborted their children and thus recognized her need to talk with someone about her abortion.

She had never spoken to anyone about it before, yet she carried it in her heart all those years. Though she knew the Lord as her Savior and had confessed the abortion as a sin before Him, there remained in her a deep sadness . . . always this deep sadness overshadowing her life.

As we talked, I asked her if she had ever recognized the humanity of her aborted baby. She looked at me in shock, and then the tears came rolling down her cheeks and she said. “No, I never have.” Together we prayed and asked the Lord to help her acknowledge that her abortion had taken the life of a human being and to help her embrace the reality of her child’s humanity. As she began to consider the loss of her child – a human child – she was finally able to grieve. Later we went to a park and had a little memorial service for her aborted child – not to glorify the child, but to acknowledge that he/she was human. Over time, her sadness lifted and she was able to move forward in her walk with the Lord.

Women and men who abort their children are not encouraged to grieve the loss of their children. They are told that they are merely “making a choice” and that any sadness probably has to do with hormones. Yet the post-abortion help lines and web chat rooms are filled with individuals trying to make sense of this “deep sadness” they carry after an abortion.

The specific sin of abortion is not beyond God’s forgiveness (1 Peter 3:18), but it does bring with it certain lingering consequences that must be addressed. One of those consequences is facing the truth that, in fact, they did not abort a blob of tissue; they aborted a child, and they lost a “someone” not a “something” because of it.

Sadly, with abortion there is no body to bury or funeral to attend, and this can make it more challenging to really believe there was a life to acknowledge. When there is a death in our society in any other instance, the deceased is treated like a person, and loved ones are allowed to mourn the loss. This woman had not mourned for her child and was therefore stuck. By helping her recognize her need to grieve, she was given hope to move forward. She is now reaching out to other post-abortive women who are suffering in silence with the love of Christ.