In her 2020 memoir, author Sharon McFee wrote about an abortion she had at 18. She calls her abortion “the greatest mistake I had ever made” and only found healing from the emotional trauma 25 years later.
McFee discovered she was pregnant after she’d broken up with the baby’s father. When she told him, he said, “We’ll manage somehow.” However, McFee had already arranged an abortion for the next day. She left right after telling him, not caring about his feelings or opinion.
According to McFee, “The doctor did not tell me what he was going to do or what to expect.” There was no counseling. She describes the pain as the doctor dilated her cervix and started the abortion:
The intense pain hit me immediately, and my stomach cramped, and I bled profusely. He induced the abortion that was to come, and indeed, there was worse to come. I lay there slowly, beginning to realize the consequences to my actions. I had given little thought to the ongoing ripple effect this would have.
At home, she says, “Guilt and pain washed over me again in waves. I reflected on how I hated myself yet again for the umpteenth time after I left the surgery… I was an attractive young woman to look at from the outside, but inside I was broken.”
She was up all night in pain, suffering from “contractions” and heavy bleeding. She felt as if “my body had turned into an unrelenting monster” and calls that night “the worst night of my existence.”
She passed her baby’s remains into the toilet the next morning and flushed him/her away.
When she told her sister about the abortion, her sister told her she would regret it. McFee replied, “No, no, I won’t!” She says, “I had a steely determination to never regret the decision I had made over ending my baby’s life.”
And yet she would regret it.
Many years later, when she was married with living children, she heard a sermon in church about grief. The speaker described how sometimes people repress grief when a loved one dies. As McFee prayed silently, the full impact of her own repressed grief over the abortion hit her:
[O]ut flooded a torrent of pent-up grief that had been buried for 25 years…’I had an abortion when I was younger, and I know God has forgiven me, but I haven’t forgiven myself’ I cried in agony at the thought of what I had done to my unborn child, remembering my sister’s words that I would regret it one day.…
All the guilt and pain and denial came pouring out like pus bursting out of an infected wound. It felt like it had been buried in the pit of my stomach all this time. I cried and cried and cried.
With the help of others in her church and their prayers, McFee finally found peace from the abortion that had haunted her for a quarter of a century.
Source: Sharon McFee Reconciled from Abortion’s Chains (Port Orchard, Washington: Ark House Press, 2020) 34-35, 36, 141
