Sue Boyd was a young, single mother when she met the man she thought was “Mr. Right” while attending her father’s church. He, too, was a single parent — divorced with two children of his own. They had been dating for about a year when she discovered she was pregnant.
“I was so excited, but my boyfriend got angry when I told him. It was not the reaction I expected,” Boyd told Live Action News. “Worse, he told me to ‘take care of it’ and wrote me a check for a hundred dollars.”
She ripped up the check. Yet her friends encouraged her to get the abortion, telling her it would be “bad” to have two children from different fathers.
“My friends wanted to know how I would be able to take care of two children,” Boyd said. “I guess I felt I had no choice, so I went to the yellow pages for a doctor’s office that would terminate the pregnancy. At this point, I was about 17 weeks pregnant.”
When Boyd walked into the facility, there were no sidewalk counselors outside; in hindsight, she feels a pro-life presence outside the facility may have made a difference in her decision that day. She had spoken to the child in her womb the day before the abortion, telling the baby how much she wanted her.
As the nurse escorted Boyd into the exam room, she cried at the thought of what she was about to do. “The nurse patted my shoulder and reassured me that I would be much better off,” Boyd said. “When I woke up after the surgery, she was gone.”
A buried secret and a second abortion
Not long afterward, Boyd was pregnant again. She hadn’t told her parents about the first abortion. Her mom was Catholic and would have strongly disapproved, so she buried her secret where it would remain for 13 years. But once again, Boyd scheduled another abortion. This time, she had the surgery done at the hospital as an outpatient.
“I didn’t know about other pregnancy options,” Boyd said. “I had gone to Planned Parenthood and gotten on birth control, but it obviously didn’t work.”
After the second abortion, Boyd experienced considerable bleeding and pain.
“Because I had a lot of female problems, the doctor decided to do an ‘exploratory surgery’ to uncover the source of my issues,” Boyd said. “When I woke up, he told me he had removed my uterus in a complete hysterectomy.”
Baby parts from the first abortion three years earlier had still been embedded in her womb. Now, she would never give birth to another child aside from her daughter. She was only 27 years old at the time of her hysterectomy.
“I felt like a monster for having two abortions,” Boyd said. “I learned later that it’s not uncommon for women to have multiple abortions.”
She felt like damaged goods, incapable of giving or receiving love after what she’d been through. She engaged in casual sex and abused drugs and alcohol.
Boyd said, “I couldn’t let anyone into my heart, I was such a mess. I hated myself and thought everyone else did as well.”
Confession and realization
She relocated to the Midwest to take a job, hoping for her older daughter to grow up in the country.
At church, she enrolled in Dr. Neil Anderson’s “The Steps to Freedom in Christ” discipleship counseling class. While walking out of church one day, she blurted out to one of the girls in her class that she had had two abortions.
“I immediately wished I hadn’t said that. I was in such a panic,” Boyd said. “But I learned she also had abortions and miscarriages. We became good friends. It was the first time I let out my secret.”
Boyd said that one night, she felt God told her to “google” the word “abortion.”
Boyd said, “I had never really talked about my abortions and felt I would go to my grave with my shame. But when I started reading everything about abortion, my soul wept. Everything I had been told — ‘my body, my choice’ — and that it was ‘just tissue’ had been lies I’d believed.”
The emotional pain she had been grappling with, she realized, was directly linked to her abortions.
“My heart was broken,” Boyd said. “I was mad, too. About the abortions and with the doctor who took my womb.”
Boyd believes that God told her that both her babies had been girls. She decided to name them Rachael and Rebecca. She was finally at a turning point.
Finding true healing… and a calling
“I was going through a divorce when a friend introduced me to a pastor at a Christian Reformed Church who told me Jesus loved me,” Boyd said. “I had tried to kill myself nine times. I didn’t really want to die, I just wanted the pain to go away.”
She started seeing a Christian psychiatrist and worked with her pastor to overcome her past and put the shame and guilt behind her.
“I was in therapy for about 33 years, and hospitalized at a mental facility thirteen times,” Boyd said.
But she realized that all along God had been working in her life, cradling her during the worst of times.
Boyd said, “He was literally putting me together again. I got two dogs that helped me heal and they were a gift from God.”
From 2000 until 2005, she led an abortion recovery Bible study in her home. Fourteen years later, she attended a Rachel’s Vineyard weekend retreat to heal the wounds inflicted by her abortions. She was ready for where God would direct her next.
“I got active with Silent No More and remarried,” Boyd said. “Then, I got a phone call from the 40 Days for Life campaign, asking me if I’d be interested in leading the fall 2023 campaign.”
She enrolled in training and went to Ann Arbor to share her story there at a 40 Days for Life vigil.
“It was heartbreaking to seeing families go into Planned Parenthood, pushing strollers with toddlers,” she said.
Due to back surgery, she was inactive during the 2024 campaigns but plans to return in 2025 as a co-leader.
“God has done so much in my life,” Boyd said. “He has given me forgiveness, healed my body and set me free from my addiction to drugs and alcohol. I don’t sugarcoat my anything about my past. I want the truth to be told — that we are all created in His image for His purposes.”
Tell President Trump, RFK, Jr., Elon, and Vivek:
Stop killing America’s future. Defund Planned Parenthood NOW!
