A husband, three children, work, a home, a normal family life. And then fragile health—the aftermath of serious surgery years before. Yes, fragile health. Yes, my doctors had warned me to live carefully, with many precautions. But I didn't know how far those warnings would go.
One day a missed period made my heart race. In secret, I took a test: positive. Immediately I told myself, "Yes. New love, come to us!" I called the doctor to let him know and plan how to manage the pregnancy.
He summoned me and my husband urgently. He laid out the options in the darkest terms: therapeutic abortion was the only way forward.
I was speechless. I consulted other doctors, other specialists. All agreed: abortion. Some spoke with human compassion. Others with irritated intolerance: "You already have three children. What do you want? To leave them orphaned?"
My husband, my sister—they said: "Put yourself in our position."
I had no network of support then, no solidarity around me. Not yet. I was walking into a dark tunnel with no way out.
That tunnel opened onto a June morning. I was lying on a table when a doctor said, "It's done." And in that same instant, I felt the heat of a guillotine inside my body.
What I have written so far is not an attempt to justify myself. Since that 24th of June, guilt has lashed me without mercy.
I have written this as a matter of truth, of bearing witness. And above all because I did not know. I did not know what comes after.
People have written much about this. I won't repeat it. I can only speak to my own experience—which is mine alone.
That guillotine inside me stayed with me for a long time. It marked me physically, psychologically, spiritually.
At first, I was so darkened that I could not think. Then I began to work through it.
I gave that child a name and a face. I made him my fourth son.
Later my life knew grace. An intense parish life, a spiritual awakening, opened horizons I had never known.
I would like to say that today this guilt is a "happy fault." In many ways it has been.
God the Father, good and merciful, has bent down to me. I believe He has forgiven me. I needed that forgiveness so badly.
But in purely human terms, that guilt sits in a corner of my heart. It hasn't gone away.
Yet there is this: that guilt no longer sits alone. It sits with a face and a name. Because that child, too, is always in my heart. I speak to him. I ask his forgiveness many times over. And now that I am alone, it is he who often caresses me.
M.S., 2006