Live Action’s Can’t Stay Silent campaign gives a voice to post-abortive women who deeply regret their abortions and want to share their stories in the hopes of sparing others the heartache of abortion. In the latest video, Carmen shares her story and an encouragement for mothers to choose life for their babies, saying, “This is a choice you won’t regret.”
Carmen was a single mother with two young sons when she found herself pregnant. Worried that her career would be in jeopardy if she had another child, she decided to get an abortion, believing the abortion worker who told her the baby was nothing more than a “glob of tissue.”
Immediately following the abortion, Carmen says she was “relieved and ready to put that bad experience behind me.” Instead, she spent the next year angry and in denial while she suffered nightmares, depression, and a sense of worthlessness. Though she loved her children, she found herself leaving them in daycare and working more than she needed to because she “didn’t feel worthy to be their mom.”
Finding herself pregnant yet again due to what she acknowledges was her “promiscuous lifestyle,” Carmen made an appointment for a second abortion. Sitting in the waiting room, she was surprised to find that she wasn’t the only woman who had already had an abortion, and who experienced nightmares as a result of it.
She explains that the procedure was more traumatic the second time around. “This time the pain felt like a knife was ripping out my insides,” she said. “Much worse than I remembered before.” She experienced heavy hemorrhaging after the procedure, and the complications resulted in the eventual need for a complete hysterectomy. Carmen says she left the facility that day emotionally scarred, noting, “I felt like I had died on the inside.”
After researching fetal development and the reality of what abortion really does to the preborn child, she was “horrified.” Carmen says that in the years since, she has made peace with God through tremendous prayer and counseling. “I am so thankful for my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ who has forgiven me, healed me, restored my life.”
She adds, “I committed to God that I would spend the rest of my life speaking truth about the issue of abortion so that babies would not have to die needlessly, and so that other women would not suffer and live with regret as I do to this day.”
