Published November, 2000
The experts are right. When Robin left the office, she felt a sense of relief. Finality. Her problem was taken care of, and she could now go on with life.
Robin knew she had made the right decision. Her boyfriend was still in high school. And her parents would never be able to accept that their beautiful daughter was pregnant. The counselors at the Planned Parenthood confirmed Robin’s deepest fears. They assured her, abortion was her only answer.
As a high school student, she was too young for an abortion, but the counselor reassured her, “Just lie about your age and pay in cash. The doctor won’t ask any questions.” He didn’t. A nurse held her hand, and the doctor removed the 14-week fetus from Robin’s young womb. Finally, her problems were over.
More than twenty years after her abortion, Robin is a confident business–woman who exudes a quiet peace. “I’ll sit here right now and tell you a woman walking into an abortion clinic today is probably going to walk out relieved. Most women are very relieved after an abortion. We’re told that is our problem, and it’s over. But it’s not.” She quickly recounts the events following her abortion.
Life did move on for Robin. She finished high school and met the man of her dreams. Three years after her first pregnancy, as a married woman, she and her husband began a family. And finally, pregnant with her first son, she began to have serious thoughts of her abortion.
For the first time, reality challenged the abortion doctor’s statements to Robin. He had calmed her fears, saying that her pregnancy was simply a “mass of tissue.” He had emphasized how small it was, “the size of the top of my thumb.”
But as Robin followed the growth of her son in her womb, she came to know the truth. The “mass of tissue” had actually been a vigorous moving, kicking, smiling baby in development. At 14 weeks, Baby-Joshua was sucking his thumb, squinting, swallowing, and he was sensitive to touch. Baby-Joshua had been able to feel the abortion that ended his life.
Robin talks about facing the truth of her abortion. “For me there was not a moment. I think there was a part of me that knew prior to the abortion, but I was so frightened….And then, when I became pregnant, I started to have the realization of the differences.” Thinking of her aborted fetus and the tiny fetus now moving inside of her, “The only difference was that this one was wanted. They couldn’t have taken him away from me, they would have had to tie me down.
“That’s when the denial started to break, and I had to start thinking about it in a different way.” Looking back, Robin explains how she fought for peace once again. “It was very uncomfortable. So then I started shoving those feelings aside.”
She also decided to use her experience with abortion to help other women who might be facing a crisis pregnancy. She volunteered to work at a Crisis Pregnancy Center, (CPC). She thought, “I don’t want anyone to know what I’ve done, but I’m going to see if I can’t help make sure no one else goes through that.” She went to CPC to help other women, but ended up facing her own problems.
Although Robin hid her own abortion from everyone, at a CPC training for volunteers, a stranger broke through the veil of secrecy. She walked up to Robin and said, “Well, when are you going to let God deal with the pain in your life?”
Robin gives the woman credit, “She did not know I was post-abortive, but she was very insightful. I realized then that I was really no good to anybody else until I dealt with my own concerns.”
As Robin worked through the post-abortive recovery program, she came to understand many of the common concerns facing women. “It’s very painful. Most people don’t want to talk about it.” She shared with other post-abortive women a feeling of shame, intensified by years of hiding the abortion and maintaining secrecy.
And the effort to deny her feelings over the years had taken its toll. Robin explains, “Of course, we all know now, you can’t select certain feelings to shove aside. When you shove the bad ones aside, you also shove the good ones aside. Like so many women then, I became full of rage, anger.”
As the anger worked inside of Robin, it rose to the surface inside of her family. “I verged on child abuse because I did not see that I could become a good mother. I didn’t see that I deserved to be a good mother. I was awful with my children. I didn’t bond well with them.”
In a final attempt to reach peace, seventeen years after her abortion, Robin attended the CPC recovery program for post-abortive women. “God finally turned up. He healed it. But it almost destroyed my life and my kids and my husband, anyone in my path.”
With the courage gained from her recovery program, Robin remembers the most empowering experience that helped her make it through the process. She decided to bring her experience into the open. “I think for me it was probably the first person outside of my family that I told. If she had not been wholly supportive, I probably would have crawled right back in my hole. It was my sister-in-law who is one of the most influential pro-life persons in Texas. I just figured that I would be condemned all the way straight to hell when I told her I was post-abortive. And she just loved me. I think I told her how much that has meant.”
Today, Robin knows final peace, complete peace. She has been able to face the truth of abortion and accept the forgiveness offered by Christ on the cross. But she knows it’s not easy. “During the group, it just became very evident that this was where I needed to be. This was where God was calling me—in the ministry to work with other women who have been through an abortion experience.”
In 1998, she and three other women retreated to a friend’s cabin in the Flagstaff area. “We were in total awe and exhilarated by the vision God gave us as we committed each and everything to Him in prayer. We felt the ministry was birthed at this time.” Pathway to Peace was formed upon their prayers and God’s promise.
It’s been a long road since a scared teenager walked out of an abortion clinic many years ago. And it’s been a hard-fought battle to reach a Final Peace. But Robin has made it. And she gives God the glory that he might now allow her to bring other women along that same path to recovery, a Pathway to Peace.