The book Short of a Miracle by Crystal Pitrois tells the true story of Tina Torry and her daughter Heidi, who survived an abortion while she was in her mother’s womb.
Tina Torry (then Tina Huffman) went for an abortion at age 17. She found out later that her daughter survived the abortion procedure that was meant to kill her in the womb. Torry and her daughter would go on to become pro-life activists, reaching out to women at clinics and helping post-abortive women heal. But before embracing the pro-life cause, Torry had another abortion and then chose to have an unnecessary D & C, which ended her third pregnancy.
At the time of her second abortion, Torry was still pro-choice. She recalls being in the recovery room with all the women who, like her, had just had an abortion. All the women were crying. The book’s author, Crystal Pitrois, tells the story:
Girls were walking around the room crying. Not hiding their tears. They couldn’t hide them. Their tears were too real. Their hearts broken. …Had they aborted their babies like she had the first time? In an effort to make everyone happy? To do what everyone wanted them to? Maybe they were 17 and felt they didn’t have another option. Possibly they had fathers who wouldn’t love them if they were pregnant. Perhaps their boyfriends had left them when they found out. Or maybe their husbands had not wanted them to have a child. …Did they have regrets?
Pitrois paints a picture of suffering women. The women in the clinic were feeling grief and loss. They were not rejoicing, glad to be free of their pregnancies. They weren’t happily embracing their “right to choose.” Instead, they were in mourning . Some of them may have understood, perhaps for the first time, that they were mothers who had just lost their children. No amount of pro-choice rhetoric could turn these women’s tears into empowerment.
Torry found herself crying as well:
[Tina Torry] realized that she, herself, had tears streaming down her face. She wasn’t sure why she was crying. She had wanted an abortion. She and her husband had decided. And still, she was crying.… I’m so relieved. It’s done. I don’t have to worry about having the baby. Those words she kept repeating over and over in her head, but she couldn’t shake the extreme sadness …. She wept without inhibition. The nurse turned to the other nurse and said in a voice filled with pity or annoyance…“She’s crying.”
Tina wanted to scream, “We’re all crying. Why are we all crying?”
These moments in the recovery room illustrate the reality that pro-choicers are so desperate to hide – abortion does not empower women. It is a violent, intrusive procedure that robs women of their children and leaves them emotionally broken.
Although Torry soldiered on and tried to put the experience behind her, she eventually faced her own complicity in the deaths of her children and was truly sorry for her abortions. Her desire to help postabortion women and save babies is what inspired her to tell her story, in the hopes that other women would not make the same mistakes.
You can read more about Torry and Heidi and their pro-life work here.
Source: Crystal Pitrois Short of a Miracle (Greenville, South Carolina: Ambassador Emerald International, 2002) 55-56
