The Impact of my Abortion
By: Tasha Fiedler
Twins, I was carrying twins, something I never expected when I made the initial appointment. I
lay upon the bed as the nurse moved the wand across my belly. Two babies on the black drop of the
little TV screen. I always wanted twins since I was a child, fighting with my older sister on who was going
to have them since they ran in our family. The nurse printed off their pictures, holding them, staring off
into space. Her thumb gently caressed the dark paper with the illuminating pictures of my two babies. I
wondered what she was thinking about as she stood across from me saying nothing.
I was ushered into another room, more of an examining room with brighter lights than the
previous one I was in. Another nurse instructed me to get undressed from the waist down. Before too
long she was at my side telling me to scoot my bottom down to the edge of the table. I was startled
when a man in a white coat blurred past me. I was terrified as I lay upon that cold table, bare feet in stirrups with a nurse by my side, jumping out of my skin when I heard what seemed to be a loud generator
click on. Trying to ease my anxieties on what was happening I counted the dots on the ceiling tile
overhead.
“Okay, one more to go,” I heard him say. It was the only thing he said to me and at that moment
part of me died.
Twenty-six years ago, I made the life altering decision to abort my twins. A decision that left me
with a plethora of trauma I could not run from to save my own life. As a child my life had many downs,
abuse, homelessness, hunger, neglect, amongst various other incidents. At twenty-one, I was already an
unmarried mother of a two-year-old little girl, and after telling my boyfriend I was pregnant, he wanted
to leave. I couldn’t see raising another baby by myself.
I didn’t know I was carrying twins until the morning of my abortion. Anxiety surged throughout
my body on what to do. I did think of getting up, walking out, but the thought of trying to raise three
kids without a husband or support person left me feeling debilitated. My life played like a movie right
before me, I didn’t want my children to ever witness the horrors on what I went through as a child.
Adoption flickered in my heart, but again, what if their new family was like mine or worse? What if they
had to endure an ounce of what their mother had to? I couldn’t live with myself if I found out their lives
mirrored mine in any sense of the word. I thought my twins would be safer in Heaven with God. So,
against everything I believed in and everything I fought for as a child, I chose to lay upon that table and
allow that man to remove two lives from my womb.
A few years before, I was the girl in high school who whenever had an oral report or written
report in English class, a class I never skipped, my reports always revolved around abortion and the
horrific ways baby’s lives are taken by abortion. I passed literature, pictures, truths, and facts to my
peers. I knew what was going to happen if I let that man do his job. But fear took over and I lost my
babies because I didn’t stay in the moment, I didn’t take a moment to just breathe and think about my
options. My mom, at one point asked if she should call a friend, but my mind was made up.
After my abortion procedure, I was ushered into a room, a kind of lounge with beds that
reminded me of the ones the high school nurse would have you lay down on until your menstrual
cramps subsided. A television was tuned to a loud talk show as if to deter our minds from what just
happened to us in real time. There was about a dozen young women who looked around my age. We all
found ways to avoid eye contact with one another and when I did catch a glimpse of any of them, they
all looked how I felt, empty. And in a literal sense, I was. I walked in with a full womb with two babies
inside, but there I was a while later, my womb vacant of my children. It took mere minutes for that man
to separate my babies from me.
I was fed a Nature Valley Granola bar and was instructed to sip from a Dixie cup of apple juice,
as if I had just given blood at a blood drive. But I didn’t feel like I had done a good deed at all. As I
nibbled on the tasteless snack, a girl turned pale and passed out. Nurses ran to her side and carried her
lifeless body out of the room. It was then, that I knew for a fact, I had done something terribly wrong.
Tears of grief washed down my face, but not one nurse asked if I was alright. It was as if they were just
as ashamed, and grief stricken like the rest of us motherless girls sitting around having snacks while it
felt like my soul was bleeding to death.
As I sat outside to wait for my brother to pick me and my mom up, I felt like I was floating and
weighed down at the same time. I sat on the gum covered ground, the sidewalk felt like sandpaper
under my summer dress. It was July 25, 1995, a beautiful sunny summer day, but my world had gone
dark. I looked up from the ground when I heard genuine laughter, my gaze settled on a group of three
carrying Styrofoam containers. A beautiful black woman was laughing. I caught my breath when I saw
her baby bump protruding out of her red business dress, I thought, she resembles me, that’s my favorite
color, she’s pregnant, and I’m not anymore.
From that day on, the emotions from my decision to abort my twins haunted me no matter
where I went. There was a landmine of babies, everywhere was a trigger waiting to go off. I couldn’t
shop for diapers for my two-year-old daughter without crying for her siblings. Seeing pregnant women
made my womb ache. I couldn’t eat, sleep, or think straight. Everything I thought I’d get back to was no
longer the focal point. I longed for my babies. I needed to know what they would’ve looked like,
sounded like, even smelled like. The urge to hold them just once was always heavy on my heart.
I hated myself for what I had done. My emotions ranging from sadness, fear, anger, guilt,
shame, remorse, grief, panic, anxiety, hopelessness, foolishness, embarrassment, and that’s only naming
a few. I didn’t know what to do with the emotions that ravaged me day and night. I was a mess and had
no one to talk to, no one to console me or make it better. I was up many nights on 1-900-HELP lines
pleading with them to help me. After contemplating suicide, I knew I needed to do something and
joined an Abortion Recovery program called Conquerors. It was then that I was able to see a sliver of
light throughout my darkness.
I felt God’s forgiveness and understood the importance of grieving and putting closure to what
had happened to my twins and my role in which I played. But I still felt out of sorts. My babies were
indeed resting in heaven, their mother on the other hand was restlessly living trying to clean up the
mess she created. I tried everything to feel happy, but it was useless. It wasn’t until the twenty-fifth
year, that I fully surrendered to God’s gentle pursuit of me. I learned through a second abortion
recovery group, Forgiven and Set Free how much God loved me, and it was me who had hated myself for
what I had done after all those years.
I was able to touch on my inability to fix it, that the fixing was only something God could do, and
He was willing to do it. I had to allow God to touch the pain, remaining obedient to the process as he
invited me to sit through each feeling. To forgive all who played a part in my decision to abort my
children, even the man in the white coat who had my twins’ blood on his hands. But me, the one who
truly had blood on her hands, I had to learn to forgive myself. To show myself the grace God had shown
me even before I was born. The very last thing I was able to forgive is the fact that I signed a form at the
abortion clinic, giving the clinic permission to “dispose of them.” Knowing my baby’s bodies were
thrown into the garbage was an incredible pill to swallow and one of the hardest things I, their mother
could let go of.
Mothers are designed to bring children into the world, to nurture, care, and protect them.
Abortion goes against this God-ordained design. It is unnatural to harm our children, abortion is the
most harmful thing I could have done to my babies, further harming myself into utter despair. Looking
back, adoption would have been the best parenting decision I could have made for them. They had a
right to life just as much as I did, even if mine wasn’t anything I would have signed up for and even if
they had to endure whatever that something was, that wasn’t for me to decide how their life should
turn out. But because fear won, my children lost. And although, I have been forgiven, my abortion
redeemed and used to save babies, married to their father for twenty-five years along with three more
healthy pregnancies producing three healthy children, I still think of my twins every day. I miss them and
wonder… But the pain isn’t insufferable as before, I know we will be reunited in God’s time.
God turned my mess around for His greater glory, using His redemption of my abortion to help
other women who were like me, afraid and full of helplessness, to slow down and stay in the moment.
To not fast forward. That baby isn’t coming tomorrow, you have time. There’s adoption, better yet, you
are stronger than you believe because God is wanting to carry you over what you feel you cannot walk
through. God has shaped and molded me to be able to facilitate mothers like me who have lost their
children to abortion to know God never once judged you, hated you, nor left you before during, nor
after your abortion. His desire is for you to receive His unfailing love having grace for yourself as he
continues to have with you…that there is hope after your abortion…that you have the God given right to
freedom and to joyfully live the life He has set out for you.
“Here I am! I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will
come in and eat with that person, and they with me.” Revelation 3:20
Your unplanned pregnancy will only hinder you if you allow it to. It starts with pumping the
brakes. The devil will have the nerve to push fast forward on your life creating future chaos, when he
doesn’t even have the authority. He will make you feel like you can’t, that having a baby isn’t an option.
He will cause confusion, make you forget what you once fought for, lower your self-esteem and coerce
you into performing the most irreversible acts in the world, then use the exact thing he orchestrated
against you. Only God can go before us. God goes before us to make our paths straight, He knows the
obstacles we will face and if it needs repairing, He is already fixing what we cannot see. We can do
anything through Christ who gives us strength. God will help us in any situation. His desire is not to
cause worry, only the devil will do that.
“Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your
heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? Matthew 6:26
Your abortion doesn’t define you. The enemy wants us to remain in silence. God’s will is to
break the chains of captivity, isolation, shame, and worthlessness. We can trust His process because his
love for us is unconditional. No one will ever love us as God does. I’m praying that whoever is reading
this knows there is pure forgiveness after abortion because Jesus’ wounds have set us free.
“Come now, let us settle the matter,” says the Lord. “Though your sins are like scarlet, they shall
be white as snow; though they are red as crimson, they shall be like wool.” Isaiah 1:18
~Tasha~