Woman Reflects Back on the Baby She “Didn’t Want”

By Dave Andrusko
National Right to Life

I am giving a talk today to members of NRLC’s Academy. In addition to explaining how NRL News Today is composed and distributed, my goal is to make it more of a back-and-forth for one simple reason. I try to take every opportunity to understand how young people think, which is different than an oldster like me.

One of the many objectives of NRL News Today and our monthly NRL News is to peer behind the curtain, to understand not just what pro-abortionists say but why. What premises are floating about untethered to reason?

To be done well, we must read carefully, especially for a woman who has had an abortion. She may defend her “choice” as the best thing that ever happened–to her. But in the same response–in person, online, or in a newspaper–you will read inklings of regret and sorrow and remorse. And yet, so often, those second thoughts are then excused away.

As I put my thoughts together for today’s time with the Academy students, I thought of one of the “best” examples of this amazing back and forth–a 776-word-long op-ed that appeared years in the New York Times written by Susan Heath. In it we see Heath pining for the “good old days.”

Which were in 1978–five years after Roe v. Wade was decided!–a time when she was 38. Heath already had four sons and (she tells us) she’s “about two and a half months pregnant.”

Five words summarize where she was at: “I don’t want this child.”

Give Heath credit. None of the usual diversionary stuff. She wrote that little babies are cute—indeed, “I delight in newborn babies with their delicate weightlessness, the curl of their small fingers around my thumb.”

What’s the best thing about them now? “[T]hey belong to other people. I don’t want to bear them, feed them, bring them up, be responsible for them.”

Put more straightforwardly, “I’ve got other things to do,” adding later by way of further clarification, she was “on a different track now.”

And in the good old days she got back on track by zipping down to the non-judgmental, protestor-free Planned Parenthood clinic. There Heath has the abortion which is “really not so bad; in fact it’s not as invasive as going for monthly checkups when you’re pregnant. They’re kind, they tuck me up under a blanket and say my husband can pick me up soon and take me home. I’m fine.”

National Right to Life News story continues here

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