OPINION: The truth of life and loss in every miscarriage and abortion

It’s usually safest not to compare tragedies since there is so much nuance to each, so let me be clear from the beginning: I am not comparing abortion and miscarriage. They are not the same.

But I will say this: as a mother who has lost two children — my only children — to miscarriage in the span of eight months, abortion viscerally upsets me now. To my core. Having longed for, prepared for, bonded with, and cherished my babies in utero, only to have them taken from me — it breaks me in ways I didn’t know possible that tiny growing humans are intentionally killed in the womb en masse every single day.

There’s a difference between understanding something in theory and living it in your body.

Grief and Anger

Before my miscarriages, I knew abortion was wrong. I knew it was evil. I knew it was the killing of innocent humans. But after miscarrying twice, that belief is no longer just in my head. It's in my bones, my gut, my soul. I have held that loss. I have felt life inside me and then slip away.

And because of that, I cannot look at abortion now with anything but true grief and righteous anger.

I’ve only ever seen my babies on ultrasound after they had already died. Not their heartbeats flickering, not their tiny movements — just the stillness of death where there should have been life.

That image is burned in me. The devastation of it cannot be explained. You go in hoping, praying for good news, for a miracle, and instead you’re met with silence. 

I had a D&C to pass my second miscarriage last month. Walking into that procedure knowing that my baby was already gone was one of the most hollow, gut-wrenching experiences of my life. When I woke up after the procedure, emptiness swept over and throughout my body, my soul.

This is why abortion enrages me all the more now. The very thing I begged God not to let happen to me, millions of women willingly choose. The loss I grieve so deeply is treated by others as an option, even a right. I would have given anything to hold my children alive in my arms, but instead I was left with shattered hope and a silent womb.

How can I not grieve when others throw away that which I wanted with my everything?

Cognitive Dissonance

I am not here to shame women who have had abortions. I will say categorically and unapologetically that killing an innocent human being is always wrong and evil.

But I also understand that many women are coerced, manipulated, or feel utterly trapped. Some are told it is their only choice. Some are abandoned, unsupported, or so weighed down by fear or poverty or abuse that they believe they cannot possibly bring a child into the world. I see those women. I grieve with them. And I hope and pray all mothers will courageously and selflessly choose to let their children live no matter their circumstances. But this reflection isn’t primarily about the women.

It’s about the act itself, and about the system that has made abortion normal, accessible, and even celebrated.

It’s about the cognitive dissonance of a medical field that can congratulate a pregnant mother in one room while killing a preborn child in the next.

That will never make sense to me. It is reprehensible.

Unlike many mothers who genuinely don’t know what abortion is, every abortion provider knows exactly what they’re doing. They know it’s not a “clump of cells.” They’ve seen the ultrasounds, the tiny bodies. The tiny body parts. They know what each type of abortion does to target and kill the child.

They know. And yet they still end lives.

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Miscarriage and Abortion are Both Tragic

When I think about my children, I don’t just grieve what I lost. I also grieve for every child who is never given the chance to live at all.

I grieve that while I mourn my babies, our culture celebrates when women intentionally kill theirs. 

The truth is simple: life in the womb is life. Human life. If miscarriage is tragic, then abortion is tragic. If my babies were real people worth grieving, then every baby killed in an abortion is a real person worth grieving.

The difference is that I didn’t choose for my babies to die.

Having tasted the surrealness, hope, nerves, and beauty of expecting a child, only to lose it all, the weight of each human life hits differently now. And the weight of human death in the womb hits hard.

Life is Fragile and Sacred

My babies have taught me many things, and I imagine they’ll continue to do so. They’ve taught me about grief and surrender. They’ve taught me how fragile and precious life is. But mostly, they’ve taught me how palpably sacred our tiny humans in the womb are. How real.

These people coming to us, growing from the moment of fertilization, cannot be dismissed, dehumanized, or reduced to a “choice.” My babies’ lives, however short, mattered.

And so does every single human being in his mother’s womb.

Abortion has always been wrong, but miscarriage has made it undeniably, unforgettably wrong. Every life is worth protecting, and no act of convenience, fear, or pressure can make the killing of an innocent child anything but evil. 

For Jack and Ponty and all the babies.