by Jill Edwards

Created on: April 07, 2007   Last Updated: October 31, 2008

A quick rush of pain. I hear my heart beat while another one stops. The doctor tells me it's over, and I can still have children later on if I choose to. Choice, that is what it really boils down to isn't it? The choice to have sex with someone that I didn't want to have children with? The choice to pay a doctor $450.00 to end what I felt like I couldn't, or didn't want to handle? The choice to tell myself that it didn't have a soul yet, and that I wasn't taking a life?

My mind still tries to tell my heart every day that I did the best that I could with what I was dealt at the time. I know deep in my soul that it's not the truth, even if I try repeatedly to block it from my mind.

The hardest points in the last seven years have been while I was intentionally pregnant. My first pregnancy, feeling my child kick and move about, only made me think, "Would my first born have been a boy or a girl? How could this child ever stand to look at me if he were to discover that I had killed his older brother, or sister?"

I have had some great difficulty couping with what I did on many occasions through my life. I must say that right now, just writing about this is bringing up hard, and difficult emotions that I had hoped I would not feel again. I can't keep pushing these feelings away, or even trying to justify my choice.

I tried to tell myself that it was not a "life" and that if it could not survive on it's own, that it did not have a soul yet, so I could not be really killing anything. But, anything with a heart beat is a living being isn't it? A newborn child cannot live on it's own? Some children are born prematurely at only a few months old and with the help of modern medicine survive to live normal lives.

I can't say that it is always wrong, I don't know. If I had been raped by someone and become pregnant I don't know if I could have it. If I was dying of cancer, I don't know if I could have it. If I was a crack addict, or had A.I.D.S., I don't know if I could have it. It's not an easy thought from either side, all I can tell you is mine. My side is never ending guilt for the life I took for no other reason than irresponsibility.

Grieving you ask? How do you grieve for the life that you intentionally took? It's not grieving, it's shame, it's never ending guilt. It should be. Now, I have two children and I thank God for them. I look at them and think how lucky I am, and what a great gift that I wasted. There are so many women out there that can't have children, and so many of us that waste our most precious gift from God.

I'm crying now and can barely go on. I don't know what this article might mean to you, it is just me telling my story. It is the sad truth of what I did, and what will never leave me. I hate this feeling in my stomach and my head, I butchered my child.

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