My name is Angelina Steenstra and I am the national coordinator for the Silent No More Awareness Campaign. This year marks 21 years since the courageous mothers and fathers who have lost children to abortion have joined me here at Parliament Hill to talk about the choice we all made not to protect our children in the womb.
I was date raped at 15 and discovered I was pregnant. The so-called counselor at an abortion mill I called told me abortion was the obvious solution to my problem. I was so afraid of losing the love and respect of my family, of having to leave high school, of a hopeless future. My child was conceived through a violent act in which I had no choice. But I made the choice to abort my baby. I thought I was protecting myself. At the time I did not realize that my child needed protecting, too.
I made the long, lonely journey to the U.S. alone. In that abortion mill, I listened as my baby’s body was vacuumed from my womb, and I watched as her remains filled up a large jar.
The teenager who made the return trip to Canada was a changed person, much more alone than when I had started out. The self-destructive path I stumbled along as I tried to numb the pain that was crushing me took me to the darkest depths of my soul. I was cut off from family and friends. Cut off from God. The abortion had cut me off from my own child.
But even though I had not protected my child, God protected me. He set me on a healing path that led me here.
Seven years after marrying my husband Walter, we conceived our first child, a son. But the pregnancy was ectopic, the baby growing outside my womb. He died during my first trimester. I could not have protected him - although I desperately wanted to. We named that child Joseph Michael and it was he who brought me the gift of clarity to accept that I had failed to protect the first child I conceived, a daughter I named Sarah Elizabeth.
From the moment I had the courage to accept what I had done, Sarah became real. She was a human being, a child of God. She was my daughter and I failed to protect her.
I resolved that Sarah’s death would not be in vain. That’s why I never forget the other mothers and fathers living in the bondage of silence for choosing abortion. It’s why I had the courage to stand up at Parliament Hill in 2003 and give my testimony and why I brought the Silent No More Awareness Campaign to Canada the following year.
Every child needs protection at conception, no matter the circumstances of that conception, or the level of her development in the womb. Our genetic blueprint is complete at conception. If Sarah was to have blonde hair or brown eyes, if she had my laugh or my blood type, all that was already determined. I thought that by having the abortion, I was protecting myself, but it was Sarah who needed protection. I recovered from the rape, but every day I regret my choice to abort my child.
I am Silent No More because every child deserves protection at conception.