By Dave Andrusko
Editor’s note. The beauty of the Internet is that stories circulate pretty much indefinitely. Every so often people see posts that you’ve written before-sometimes a long time ago. When they take the time to write to express their gratitude, it’s a good sign it is worth sharing with our ever-growing NRL News Today audience a second time.
Over the weekend I saw a link on Facebook to a blog entry that appeared, coincidentally, on my birthday. It was a reflection titled “My Other Daughter.”
I had been alerted about the contents, but otherwise would not have known initially that this was both a tribute and a quiet plea for forgiveness to the child she had aborted twenty three years before.
I naturally thought of what is for men the classic post-abortion story–”Remembering Thomas: Responsibility, Guilt and a Child Who Never Was“–written by Phil McCombs, then of the Washington Post.
In the beginning you might be led to think Marilou had given her first daughter up for adoption. Indeed, why is she so hard on herself for such a courageous and honorable decision? Then she writes
You see, unlike my daughter Anna, who I love so very much and showed my love to by giving birth to her, my other daughter did not receive that same love from me. Instead, I ‘chose’ to end her life. Instead of loving her in all the ways a mother would love a baby (born or unborn), I disposed of her. Instead of thinking about all the ways she could impact this world, I tossed her aside as if she were worthless. Only God knows at this point how things would be different; who she would be, whose lives she would have influenced…how God would have used her on Earth.
Then she asks, “Why am I telling this story now?”
“Well I guess it’s only because my daughter Anna in a sense gave my other daughter a voice. And while Anna was thanking me for ‘loving her enough.’ I also heard my other daughter’s voice saying, ‘how come you didn’t love me enough?’”
Your heart quickly melts. And if you are, like me, a softy, you sense a catch in your throat.
Without exception every time I read a soul-stricken account like Marilou’s, I think of the anti-life propagandists who insist that women rarely suffer from their abortion and, if they do, they had it coming to them.
Okay, that’s a bit of an exaggeration but not much. The Abortion Establishment rationalizes that these women brought their emotional baggage to their abortion, and it merely spilled out, so to speak, after their child’s life was extinguished. For me, that’s worse than pretending there are no devastating aftershocks.
For those many women who’ve experienced an abortion, I hope you take a few minutes to read her kind and generous entry.
If not, please consider her conclusion.
“For the short time you were there, you were knit together in my womb by God’s hands. You are beautifully and wonderfully made! And although you were never alone having lived these 23 years in the presence of your heavenly Father and his angels and our family members that were already ‘home’, you also have a very large family here on earth with loving parents, siblings, grandmas and grandpas, LOTS of aunts, uncles and cousins. My beautiful baby… you are wanted, you are precious, you are loved!”
Editor’s note. If you want to peruse stories all day long, go directly to nationalrighttolifenews.org and/or follow me on Twitter at twitter.com/daveha. Please send your comments to [email protected].