During the March for Life last month, a woman marched holding a sign that read, “Four of my siblings were aborted. Choose life.” She stopped to share her story with Students for Life of America, and it was shared on the pro-life group’s social media accounts.
Raised to be “pro-choice, pro-abortion,” she explained she had to give the idea of induced abortion additional thought when faced with the news that each of her parents had lost two children to abortion at different times.
“I march for my four siblings,” she explained, “because there is no grave. There’s nowhere to lay flowers. They have no names, there are no birth dates, and there are no death dates. So, they didn’t have a voice.”
She stated that as a teenager, her father had two girlfriends who underwent abortions. He told her about them when she was in her twenties and the two had a candid conversation about abortion. She said he also told her about the two abortions her own mother had undergone. The first abortion was before this woman was conceived and was carried out because her mother felt she “wasn’t ready” at the time for a baby. The second abortion was committed about three to six months after her mother gave birth to her.
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“She didn’t want to go through pregnancy a second time,” the woman explained. “She didn’t care for it.”
These stories had a deep impact on the woman’s thoughts regarding abortion.
“It really changed my perspective,” she said, “because I was raised pro-choice, pro-abortion, and as I had been dating someone, and I thought about the arguments, I was like, ‘I don’t think I can stand for this anymore. I can’t do this.’ Because the more I thought about the reasons that they gave, you know, ‘It’s your mother’s choice,’ and ‘I didn’t want to go through this,’ and ‘I didn’t feel like this.’ The more I thought about the reason why I was had is more that I was the more conveniently timed one.”
This realization — that her life was essentially owed to timing — made her more pro-life. Her thoughts and feelings echo those of other individuals who have lost siblings to abortion.
Like the woman at the March, Penelope realized after learning about her mother’s abortion that she was spared from abortion because she was not “inconvenient enough.”
“Knowing I wasn’t inconvenient enough to end up the way my sister was, and the fact my mother felt she needed to do what she did out of vulnerability, pressure, and panic makes me feel guilt in that I was spared and that I couldn’t help her choose life at the time,” Penelope explained.
Another sibling survivor explained the pain they felt after learning of their mother’s abortion. “We let it drop and I forgot about it,” they wrote. “But I had not really forgotten. I didn’t think about it consciously for years.” They added that years later, “Suddenly I found myself thinking about my little brother! I became disoriented and lost control of the car for a moment as I burst into tears having lost him. I was astounded by my reaction, but I couldn’t shake the sadness and longing to have known him.”
Another survivor explained, “I have not forgotten my siblings and I never will. I miss them although I never knew them.”
And another said, “It hit me that had any of them been born, I would not have been ‘the eldest’ but the second youngest. The more I thought about it, the more I felt a certain identity crisis.”
Dr. Philip Ney, a Canadian Child Psychiatrist who began using psychotherapy for people hurt by abuse and abortion in the 1980s, discovered that mothers who had an abortion found it difficult to bond with their future children. They also had an increased risk of abusing and neglecting the children born after an abortion, and children who grew up in families that had aborted children had a condition similar to those who survived concentration camps and natural disasters. He called it Post Abortion Survivors Syndrome. Ney’s Hope Alive program helps individuals who are suffering from the loss of a sibling to abortion.
Editor’s Note: Read more here about a ministry for those who have lost siblings to abortion.
