I had rented a beautiful little cabin in the mountains and really enjoyed the solitude it afforded. One night I couldn’t sleep. So I got up and turned on the television. I flipped through the channels until I found a Christian program. It was The 700 Club. Pat Robertson was talking about abortion. The topic made me a little uneasy, but I didn’t change the station.
That night The 700 Club aired a video called The Silent Scream. This pro-life documentary was narrated by Dr. Bernard Nathanson, a former abortionist, and included live film footage of a suction abortion. For the first time I saw pictures of exactly what I had done. I was horrified, but I could not tear my eyes away from the screen.
“We are now looking at a sector scan of a real-time ultrasound imaging of a twelve-week, unborn child,” Dr. Nathanson said in his professorial voice.2Then he pointed out the child’s head and hand, the ribs and the spine. Twelve weeks. I had been a good sixteen weeks for one of my abortions, I remembered.
“The heart is beating at the rate of approximately 140 beats a minute. And we can see the child moving rather serenely in the uterus.”3The black-and-white images were grainy, but there was no mistaking the perfectly shaped fetus. I began to feel sick to my stomach. Ultrasound was not available when I had my abortions. If I had seen pictures like this . . .
“You will note as the suction tip, which is now over here, moves towards the child, the child will rear away from it and undergo much more violent and much more agitated movements . . . The child has now moved back to the profile view and the suction tip is flashing across the screen. The child’s mouth is now open . . . but this suction tip which you can see moving violently back and forth on the bottom of the screen is the lethal instrument which will ultimately tear apart and destroy the child.”
When I saw that baby, with its mouth open in a silent scream, pushing against the walls of its mother’s womb, my world completely shattered. I fell out of my chair and onto the hardwood floor, crying hysterically. The full fury of my sin, which I had stuffed so deep inside of me, erupted in such searing pain that I didn’t know if I could live through it—wasn’t sure I wanted to live through it. I lay on the floor and sobbed until I heaved.
And that’s when I heard the voice.
“Mommy, everything’s okay. We love you.”
That’s all. Just a few words uttered in a little boy’s voice. A voice so sweet and pure that it melted my heart.
