In his 2020 memoir, post-abortive father G Spencer Schirs, Jr. writes about his grief over the abortion of his baby over 24 years ago. He believes his child was a girl and has named her Grace.
Schirs wasn’t religious when the abortion took place, but he is now a devout Christian. He recalls thinking of Grace while he was praying in church:
I immediately recalled the early summer day when I met with Grace’s mom and coldly handed her the money to abort our child. It was over for me, so I thought.
I remember she was holding back the tears, biting her lip, and staying strong… She just said, ‘I’ll take care of it.’ All it would have taken was me saying, “No, not our child!”
Schirs believes that if he’d encouraged Grace’s mother to choose life, she wouldn’t have aborted Grace.
He says that at the time he was “self-centered, self-serving, and self-gratifying,” and that “[t]he weight of abortion hung over me like an anvil every day, crushing my spirit. For the next 24 years, I was ashamed, avoiding love, commitment, and, frankly, responsibility for much of anything.”
He didn’t go with Grace’s mother to the abortion facility and wasn’t there to support her emotionally afterwards. Being absent from his ex-partner’s life, and not helping her cope after the abortion, only added to his guilt and shame.
In his book, he wrote a letter to Grace, saying:
We bought the lies that you were simply a choice, nothing more than a cluster of cells to be sacrificed at the altar of convenience… Because of my selfishness at that moment, I sacrificed what was likely one of the greatest gifts I might ever receive—you.
He says that since the abortion, he has thought about Grace every single day of his life.
He says:
Every time I hear a child laugh, I cannot help but wonder what your laugh would have been like or what your favorite flower or color might have been. Would you have liked cats or dogs? Would you be a country girl or a city girl? All these questions go unanswered for now.
Before Schirs published his book, he reached out to Grace’s mother and asked her permission to tell her story.
When he contacted her, she said, “[I]t warms my heart, knowing you think of our child as much as I do.”
She too regrets the abortion and calls it “the biggest mistake of my life.”
Grace’s mother says of her post-abortion trauma:
The abortion of our child was the most awful experience I’ve ever gone through. Trust me, the procedure of an abortion is haunting! An ugly, awful, traumatic, painful, and emotionally horrible experience that never goes away!
My self-esteem was destroyed… I suffer from anxiety, smoking, endless remorse, and a sense of emptiness—all the postabortion effects no one ever talks about.
Schirs’ book shows the emotional devastation abortion can cause post-abortive parents.
Source: G Spencer Schirs, Jr. The Anvil of Guilt and Shame: A Man’s Perspective on Abortion, Forgiveness, and Calling (Murrells Inlet, South Carolina: Covenant Books, 2020) 14, 8, 85-86.
