Amy Brown, the wife of Nevada Senate GOP candidate Sam Brown, spoke publicly about her abortion this week, noting that the experience “wrecked her life.”
In an interview with NBC News, Brown describes finding out she was pregnant at age 24. Working toward a military job as an army dietician, she felt pressured by everyone around her — including the medical professionals she visited — to have an abortion.
“I felt like I had no support at all. I felt like if I were to have had a child, then I would be doing it all on my own, and that there could have potentially been negative career consequences because of that. And I was just afraid to talk to anyone about it,” she tearfully explained. “In that moment, I felt like my back was against a wall, and the walls were closing in, and I had one door out — and so I pursued that door.”
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After her abortion, she described going home and feeling abandoned. “I was alone. I felt like I was all by myself processing this major event,” she said. “I got to a very dark place and I remember being in my room and crying out: ‘God help me.’”
Brown also described how receiving support or guidance from just one person could have changed the course of her life.
“I think if one person had told me, ‘Let’s talk about what options you have and let’s talk about what everything looks like. Let’s talk about the process of doing it. Let’s walk you through adoption, let’s walk you through parenting, let’s talk about abortion’ — actually walking through each of those start to finish, so I’m not halfway through wondering what’s going on.”
She then explained feeling totally deceived by the abortion industry. “When I made my choice I was under the impression that I was choosing freedom. But I did not receive freedom. I received a five-year sentence of living with regret and shame and having my life wrecked.”
Brown’s experience in feeling pressured to abort, especially as an Army servicemember, is not a unique one. Many women have spoken about being led to feel that abortion is the only way they can be a “good soldier.” So many of these women later experience shame, regret, and anger at having been made to feel they had to kill their preborn children. Despite this, the Biden Department of Defense has enacted policies that will only make abortion easier to access for many in the military, thus increasing the feeling of coercion. Women in the military don’t need easy access to abortion, as Brown’s story demonstrates. What they do need is support and guidance that make parenting possible.
READ: Can’t Stay Silent: Susan, Adriana, and Nona share their stories of abortion regret
Brown hopes that sharing her story will help other women realize that abortion isn’t the only option. Sadly, despite her tragic story, many commenters on social media appear to have missed the fact that abortion nearly destroyed her life; to them, it is instead all about “CHOICE” (in all caps, repeatedly seen in Instagram comments). She got her “CHOICE” to kill her baby, they say… and other women should get that “CHOICE” to destroy their child’s life and potentially their own, despite the millions of women who feel exactly like Brown — despite the women who have died as a result of legal abortion. Some “choices” have deadly consequences; some “choices” aren’t actually freedom and don’t bring about freedom. And in a free society that is also a nation of laws, we restrict people’s choices every single day. Killing innocent people isn’t a human right, whether those people are in or out of the womb.
“I’m sharing my story today so that I can provide awareness for what it’s like to live in my shoes, for women who have chosen to have abortions. And also just to provide awareness to women … that they can take a break, they can take a minute, they can process and hopefully know that they have options,” she said. “My healing process was a long one … but part of that healing came from hearing the stories from other women.”
Editor’s Note: Visit CantStaySilent.com to read more stories like Amy’s, and find resources for help and healing from abortion.
