a post abortion testimony...
Set the Captives Free: Why (and How) Abortion Should Be Talked About in Church
"Kristen decided to share her secret with someone she trusted, a youth pastor. He told her something that forever changed her life and the life of her baby. 'Abortion is not an option,' he said. 'Two wrongs don’t make a right.' The kind pastor suggested that adoption would be a more loving option. 'His words reminded me that this was a baby we were talking about.'"
Not all Christian pastors would have spoken these words to Kristen, and not all Christian denominations teach their clergy to counsel in this way. I know this, tragically, from personal experience.
In 1987 I became "with child." I was not married and not in a relationship with the father. I had already been seeing a counselor for several months. She was a Presbyterian minister. When I told her I was pregnant, she agreed with everyone else I'd consulted that abortion was the only solution that made sense in my situation. Like everyone else, she said nothing about a baby. There was no acknowledgment that I was already my child's mother and responsible for his welfare, no warning of the great damage that abortion would do to my life, my heart, my mind, or my soul.
I'd joined the Catholic Church as a freshman in college, by myself, by my own choice. The next year I transferred to a Jesuit university. For three years I attended Mass almost daily, took more than the required number of theology classes, and centered my social life around a charismatic prayer group. For a few years after college I remained very involved with my home parish in a variety of ways. Then, in my mid-twenties I got a job at an Episcopal school, where I was employed for four years. Long before the end of the first year of that job I had stopped going to Mass and was attending the Episcopal church every Sunday instead. After the abortion I pretty much gave up on church for more than twenty years. In all the years prior to the abortion and until my return to the Church almost twenty-two years later, I did not, as far as I can remember, ever hear a sermon on abortion--not at an Episcopal liturgy, not at a Lutheran service (from age 9 to 17), not even at a Catholic Mass. I do, however, remember getting the message, loud and clear, from magazines, books, TV, teachers, and friends, that abortion was not only right, it was my right as a woman in the United States of America. Of course the real meaning of the word abortion was kept hidden behind the rhetoric.
the rest is here:http://heleapt.blogspot.com/2012/02/set-captives-free-why-and-how-abortion.html
