"At age 20," my mother said, "I had no inkling of the mental and emotional darkness I was about to enter. I couldn't have grasped the immense psychological toll abortion would take for years into the future--unrelenting tears, guilt, shame, and depression." While taking full responsibility for her decision to have an abortion, my mother believes she was led to what she calls her "tragic, irreversible decision" by a series of lies and distortions: distortions about fetal development, doublespeak about choice and rights, and glorification of "planned" and "wanted" children.

As my mother told the audience that day, she did not begin to heal until she understood the reality and victimhood of her aborted child. She realized that whatever hardship the baby might have caused her, it could not compare to the pain she was suffering in the wake of abortion. As long as she rationalized her choice with the notion that having a baby would have ruined her life, her secret grief festered. But one bright afternoon at her kitchen table, a moment of realization came full force. There was no moral basis for her abortion. Her so-called choice had ended the life of an innocent human being who was her own child. When she embraced these difficult truths, she was finally able to acknowledge her grief, find the peace she longed for, and begin the healing process.

Much like Merfish, I spent years actively involved with the abortion issue without realizing the toll that abortion had taken on my own family and life. When I was young, my parents ran a pro-life organization that lobbied the Southern Baptist Convention to take a pro-life stance. Our message was clear: Every unborn child is an innately valuable human person bearing the image of God. But worried that confessing her own mistakes might have the perverse effect of making me more likely to repeat them, my mother waited to tell me until I was in my early 20s. I did not know as a young child stuffing envelopes with pro-life literature or distributing pro-life voting guides before an election day that among the millions of lives lost to abortion was my own half-sibling. And I did not know on the days my mother would lie in bed crying for hours that she was grieving for her aborted child.

Stories like my mother's are rarely spoken out loud. The pain and guilt of abortion are too deep. And, sometimes, those willing to speak do not find others willing to listen. Many people seem to assume that most women reflect positively on their choice and that they have experienced little emotional, psychological, or physical repercussions--and some of those people are reluctant to consider stories that challenge that view. Surely every woman's experience is unique, and some women may feel they have suffered no ill effects from their abortions. But research on women who have had abortions suggests that my mother's experience is not uncommon. Women who lose a child to abortion, many of whom do not progress through a normal grief process that would usually accompany a pregnancy loss, are at higher risk for everything from depression, to substance abuse, to suicide. Indeed research has shown that the experience of some women following abortion is a form of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.