This I believe, in life and in choice. Sigh. I wish it was possible to be pro choice and anti abortion. I’ve had two, regret both and, despite my sadness over poor choices of my past (both engaging in behavior that caused pregnancies I didn’t feel I could keep and taking those lives), I still maintain a woman has the ultimate right to decide what her life and body can/will sustain.

I also believe life begins at conception, so I have known the shame of having broken another of the 10 Commandments. I am thankful every single day for grace and my belief in a transforming, forgiving God.

Abortion is a topic that few can broach with peaceful clarity and one that inspires deep grief within my own soul. It is more than a provocative political topic – it is a tragic reality for many women who felt there was no better choice. But in the end, it was exactly that – a choice and one that only I could ultimately make.

Oh, I wanted the phone to ring and for that white knight to bound in on his rescuing steed. I wanted him to want what I wanted. I wanted my child to live. But I also wanted its future to be one that would be full of joy and completion and solidarity. It didn’t seem to me that I could offer those things alone.

I even wanted the clinic’s counselor behind those closed doors to hear the frantic dismay in my choice, for her to somehow talk me in a different direction, to assure me that Life could triumph and Beauty prevail.

But, in the end, there was only me and the life that seemed to have taken root in the most unfortunate, inhospitable womb.

How can I profess that I loved that child – and the next – when I made the choice, twice, to end Life? How can I convince that, now far from the insanity that prevailed in those dark hours, I would reverse those decisions and cast arguments down and teach my precious, breathing children that sometimes the worst of adversity can still yield beauty’s best?

It is impossible to go back, to undo, to reform, to birth those who had a right to breathe. That has given life to something just as formidable, a grief so deep that it has taken the places that would have been wholly occupied by my pudgy offspring and the complex individuals they would have become.

Choice is individual. It is precious. It is terrifying. It is solitary. It is lonely.

It is absolute.

In the end, there is choice but, in the beginning, there was Life. This I believe, that I should have stopped (and so begun) there.

Reflections

This was extremely difficult to write and it stirs a very old, familiar sadness. The knowledge that I am not alone – and will never be alone – in this Choice inspires me to write openly about it. My hope is that the next woman to confront it will make choices that yield peace rather than utter regret.

~Cheryl Lewis