Often, after an abortion, women begin to feel regret and remorse for their decisions. These feelings can do a lot of emotional damage and cause more problems in their lives.
How can women overcome these damaging thoughts and emotions?
For starters it’s important that we understand why the feelings of regret and guilt begin to surface. Kim says that many times women will begin to experience them after they process what has really happened.
“When women come to this understanding that we are the last line of defense for our children, that we’re not, as the culture says, independent agents who can make a choice and not have any consequences that would go beyond that choice… that we could get up and walk away from a procedure or the hours following a medical abortion and walk away from the result of those pills and the induced miscarriage and nothing would be different about us… how could we possibly imagine that that could be so? I’m telling you from firsthand experience it can never be so.”
Spiritually we begin to try and deal with the choices we have made and what needs to happen next. Kim has found that one of the biggest problems that women face is how to somehow put their experience into context in a culture that is participating in abortion at the rate of about a million abortions a year for the last forty years, and yet is really not anything that is shared.
How do we process having participated in something that we regret and don’t feel like we can talk about?
“…what happens is, you know, our hearts know the truth that we failed in that role of being the last line of defense against the death of a weak child, our child, and it’s devastating when we begin to process that experience. There are a lot of things that we can do to avoid processing it, including eating disorders or addictions, poor relationships, simply isolating and straight up avoidance of others, and there are so many things that we can do to cope and most of them are, if not unhealthy, unhelpful definitely to going ahead and processing the experience.”
But what actually helps us and heals us is knowing that our Lord has come to save us. Jesus Christ came to us in order to help us process the choices in our life that have separated us from God. He does this in a way that lets us know that He’s already aware of everything we may be trying to hide from the rest of the world or cope with, and yet even though He sees everything that we’ve done and regret, He forgives us.
He’s already completely aware of our mistakes, and yet He doesn’t come to talk with us about those events so much as He comes to us to talk about and fulfill our needs. God is ready to remove those negative feelings and damaging habits. He wants nothing but the best for us, and He will grant it to us if we simply ask for it.
