Her family was well-known in town, so there was a ton of pressure to look good and “carry the name.” She couldn’t tell them. So here she was at an abortion clinic. Thinking back, her only word for the emotion of that day is “desperation.”

A couple of hours south, in Colorado Springs, 17-year-old Stacy* entered a doctor’s office. Her pregnancy wasn’t a secret. Her boyfriend was the captain of the basketball team, and a baby just wasn’t in his plans for the future. So when Stacy told him they were expecting, he told his mother, who told her mother, and before Stacy knew it, she had an appointment for an abortion.

Two different clinics, two different situations, but once Kiersa and Stacy arrived for their appointments, their experiences were similar. Both girls say they received very little real information about abortion at the clinics. It’s a trend they want to stop. And that’s why they’re sharing their stories with Brio.

Information, Please!
Abortion technology has progressed since the procedure was legalized in 1973, and today there are many options for “ending a pregnancy.” But the harsh reality is that every option kills babies before they’ve had a chance to be born. Not sure that a fetus is really a baby? Check out these facts:

• The instant an egg and sperm unite, the embryo’s DNA contains plans for every stage of human development, including gender, hair and eye color and height.

• At three weeks after conception — before some girls even know they’re pregnant — the baby’s heart is beating.

• By week six (one and a half months), this kid has brain waves!

• At nine weeks (a little more than two months), the body is nearly complete. It has internal organs, a functioning brain, fingerprints, and it responds to touch.

Psalm 139 says that God created this amazing growth process, and He has a plan for each baby’s life. The child’s mother won’t be able to feel movement until she’s four or five months along, but anyone who says a fetus is just “a blob” isn’t facing the truth.

Many abortion providers keep the facts on fetal development hidden from their clients. That’s what happened to Kiersa. Once she stepped inside the clinic, she says, “A counselor took me upstairs. She was a kind person, but she didn’t tell me a whole lot. She figured out when my last period was and said, ‘It’s just a mass of tissue right now. It’s not completely formed.’ ”

That was enough to encourage Kiersa to go through with the abortion. “I didn’t want to commit murder,” she says, “so in my mind, she told me what I needed to hear.”

Stacy wasn’t helped to understand the abortion procedure either. She says, “No one gave me any information about what was going to happen. They said things like, ‘You’re going to feel a little bit of pressure here,’ but as far as the actual abortion procedure, I was never told.”

Bad Medicine
Kiersa and Stacy ended up having the same type of abortion — a suction aspiration — where the baby is vacuumed out of the mother’s body. For Kiersa, the experience is a disturbing memory. “It was painful, and I felt so violated. It went on, it seemed like, forever.”

Other abortion procedures use techniques in which there are risks of hemorrhage, an infected uterus or scraping or puncturing of part of the reproductive system. Also, any type of abortion increases the risk of breast cancer because it alters pregnancy’s natural breast development.

In 2000, a pill called mifepristone was legalized for public use. You may have heard it called RU-486 or “the abortion pill.” Mifepristone shuts off pregnancy hormones in a girl’s body. A second pill, called misoprostol, is given to induce labor and force the fetus out of the mother’s body. This kind of abortion can cause serious cramping, bleeding and heart problems.

Abortion procedures exist for every stage of development. After four months, saline may be injected into the uterus to kill the child. Late in pregnancy, there’s dilation and extraction (D&X), also known as partial-birth abortion. The doctor kills the baby within a few inches of taking its first breath.

Hope for the Wounded Heart
If Stacy and Kiersa were clueless about abortion’s physical effects, they were less prepared for its emotional ones. Stacy recalls, “After the procedure was over, I was taken into another room. I remember crying uncontrollably and not really understanding why.”

The depression didn’t stop when she left the clinic. She forced herself to shut off the tears, but she also vowed not to let anything touch her heart again. “I became detached and unemotional. I didn’t want anything to ever hurt me like that again. I thought something was wrong with me. I didn’t want to have anything to do with my boyfriend. I felt like I was unprotected — that he really didn’t care about me.”

The backlash Stacy experienced is not unusual. Many women struggle with sadness, anger, guilt and flashbacks, and important relationships are damaged. A lot of times, these effects don’t show up for 10 years or more after the abortion, so young women may encourage their friends to abort and later discover abortion is not the “quick fix” they thought it was.

The good news is that God cares about every person affected by abortion, from the parents to the aborted child. Psalm 34:18 says, “The Lord is close to the brokenhearted,” and Psalm 30:11 says we have a God who can turn mourning into dancing. Both Kiersa and Stacy discovered this, but it was a long climb out of the pit of pain created by abortion. Don’t let fear and misinformation lead you or a friend into the same trap. Make the right choice. Defend life.

* Names have been changed.

Hope and Help
God brought healing into Kiersa and Stacy’s lives through post-abortion counseling and support at their local Pregnancy Resource Center. If you or a friend are hurting from a past abortion and would like to find the same kind of help, call Focus on the Family’s Crisis Pregnancy Ministry at 719-531-3460. The staff members can give you information about a Pregnancy Resource Center near you.