At the March for Life UK in 2020, a woman named Amy shared her personal abortion story, revealing that she was raped as a college student. When she realized she was pregnant, she went to see a doctor, who immediately suggested abortion. The next day, Amy went to a youth center where she said the counselor told her, “You need to get on with having an abortion, because the quicker this happens, the better it will be for you. You don’t need to live with this trouble for any longer than is absolutely necessary.”
She told the counselor she wasn’t sure she could live with herself if she had an abortion. The counselor offered her a chance to speak with another counselor, who was pro-life. But according to Amy, the pro-life counselor didn’t say much, and Amy was left feeling abortion was her only choice.
She ultimately decided on abortion and went to a hospital that would commit the procedure. She wasn’t told about fetal development or warned about abortion’s risks:
There was [sic] no words of counseling whatsoever. There was no alternative. There was just, this is the most sensible thing to do, so any grown-up person would be responsible right now. And of course, I wanted to be a grown-up responsible person, so I went along with that.
But Amy still wasn’t sure. The worker told her, “We’re very busy, we need to kind of get on with this. If you’re not ready, then go away and come back. I’ve got other people to see.” Amy wandered through the hospital, wondering what to do.
“I’ve since reflected on that, that half an hour of frantically walking up and down,” she explained, “and I think, my friend said to me, ‘Amy, what are you looking for? You need to go back.’ I realize now I was looking for somebody, anybody….
“Any kind of word of encouragement would have changed my mind in that moment. I was hanging on a cliff edge, waiting for somebody to catch me. There was nobody there that day.”
READ: Rape is a horrific trauma that abortion cannot heal
No one reached out to Amy in her moment of need. She went back and took the abortion pill. At the time in England, women were required to stay in the hospital until they expelled their babies. She cried through the duration of the abortion process. “I was in a lot of pain, and I was extremely stressed,” she said. “I recall I was crying, mostly, the whole time. And a nurse said to me, ‘Don’t worry, it’s quite normal to cry. And you might cry for quite some time afterward. That’s quite normal. It’s just what happens.’
“And I was thinking, well, why? This is supposed to be the good and responsible and right thing to do. Why would it make me cry endlessly?… Surely, I should be glad because all my problems are going to be over soon. But of course, that is not the reality at all. That was a lie.”
Amy is haunted by not knowing what happened to her baby’s body. “[T]here’s this horrific knowledge that you have just – a baby has just passed away. It’s passed outside your body now, and where is it? That is something that is absolutely harrowing to me. Where is that baby?”
After the abortion, Amy was devastated:
I was literally heartbroken. I had this horrendous pain in my chest, and I was so anxious all the time. I felt grief like the most precious thing to me had just died, which is actually exactly what had happened… I grieved for that baby and still do, and probably will forevermore.
Amy began drinking heavily after her abortion and abusing prescription drugs, both of which are behaviors that post-abortive women are more likely to experience. She also became suicidal — another risk factor with abortion. “I drank so much and took such a lot of painkillers in order that I wouldn’t wake up… ” she said. “Maybe if I even went to hell, that would be better than where I was at that time.”
Amy now feels abortion is never the answer, even in cases of rape. She explained, “Abortion does not heal rape. It just leaves the mother with another horrific, devastating experience to try to come to terms with on top of the fact that she has been raped.”
It upsets Amy to hear people defend abortion in cases of rape. She said, “I’ve heard people who claim to be pro-life say, ‘I don’t agree apart from in the case of rape.’ When I hear people say that it literally stabs me in the heart.”
The abortion only further traumatized her. “Abortion […] did not heal the abuse that I experienced.,” she said. “It actually made me live within that abuse situation for a lot longer because I relived [it]. After the abortion, I relived that conception over and over again. It was the absolute worst possible outcome for me.”
Amy’s full testimony is available here.
