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Testimonies
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Healing in my Family
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Jacquie
Alabama,
United States
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Good afternoon. I'm Jacquie from Birmingham, AL. I'm here to talk to you today about the shock waves of what abortion does to my family. I was three weeks away from being a new bride. I was living here in the city. I thought I had everything that anyone could possibly have. I had finished my education. I had a great job, a car, a place to live, and not dependent on my parents. I was engaged. We had participated in inappropriate relationship prior to the marriage that never happened. Three weeks before the wedding I told him I was pregnant and he said to me, "It's you or the baby, but somebody's got to die. It's got to be an abortion."
I couldn't understand that because we were three weeks away from getting married and we had talked about having children, and children was a possibility. It was certainly something that we both wanted. I thought if I backed off a little bit, him being a man, possibly nervous, about to get married, if I gave him some time to think about it, he would realize that, perhaps this wasn't such a bad situation after all. Three days after I told him I was woken up at gunpoint with a gun to my ribs and he said to me, "It's you or the baby. You make that decision." I was...had the gun to my back, was taken out to the car out in the parking lot of where we lived, and driven to a clinic up in Bethesda, next to Bethesda Naval Hospital, where the gun laid in the floorboard of the car the entire way.
He had the gun to my back as we entered the facility that looked like an actual doctor's office, not like a planned parenthood. We walked in and there were women sitting there that were pregnant and some that were not. I couldn't quite figure that out, but it gave me some hope thinking, perhaps, that this maybe wasn't going to happen the way he said it would. As I was sweating to fill out my paperwork I get called back, which was another red flag to me, because I was the last one to arrive but the first one to go back. A woman who said she was a "nurse" wanted to determine how old the pregnancy was. We determined that it was eleven weeks, which means everything was formed. Even her teeth were starting to form.
Before the paperwork could get finished the doctor comes in and says. "Are we ready?" I said, "No," and she said, "Yes." I said, "But I need to finish my paperwork." He said, "Well we're ready."
So I was taken into the room and I thought, I have some hope. You have to examine what you plan to remove, correct? As I thought the examination was being done things very, very painful and very intense. I kept asking him to stop. I begged him to stop. Then I finally rose up and screamed, "Please stop!" At that point the nurse pushed me down and she said, "Hold on just one more minute." The abortionist said, "Yes, just one more part."
At that point I would forget that for many, many years because as my sisters have said, you go into denial and you forget many things. It wasn't until someone said something to me about the different types and forms of abortion that I finally realized that my daughter had been dismembered piece by piece. I've learned later on that most abortuaries go back and they place the children back together, piece by piece, to account for everything, if you're lucky.
After the procedure there was no numbing of the patient. There was nothing to calm me down. Nothing. The doctor said to me, "If you have excessive bleeding you can go to the emergency room. If you have pain, you can take Tylenol, and release pain." I walked out into, what was the waiting room at that facility, my fiancé was gone, never to be seen again.
I walked across the street, thinking there was a parking deck across the street, and I thought well maybe he had actually grown a conscious and maybe he's parked the car there. As I proceed to go across the street in Bethesda I collapse in the middle of the road and almost bled to death by the time the paramedics got me. What happened then was even worse. I was admitted to the hospital. I was living a lie. I had a wedding in three weeks. I couldn't call my parents. I couldn't tell anyone. It wasn't until, literally, half my life later that I would be able to tell my parents and then be able to seek the healing that I needed at Rachel's Vineyard.
My parents were stunned at first, then they started to see all of the emotional problems that I was having. I was going to see shrink after shrink after shrink and being put on medication like a zombie. Finally I realized there had to be something else and that's when I was introduced to Rachel's Vineyard.
The beautiful part is that when I told my parents about this, Father Joseph actually told me that I needed to name my child because that would be very important at Rachel's Vineyard. So the name came to me in adoration, Lily Gabrielle. I shared that with my family and when I got home from work that evening there was this huge bouquet of when I was supposed to leave for this retreat, and it was lilies and white roses with a card that read, "We're with you and Lily all the way. Love, Mom and Dad." What they didn't understand is that after that retreat I would go public. My first testimony was given here a few years ago and when I called and told me parents what I had done my mother's words to me were, "Maybe you're the one that should have been aborted." That's the type of shock waves that this can have.
There has been healing in my family. I now realize that it took so many years for me to get to the point in my healing that I did, how could I possibly ask my parents to forgive me overnight ad realize that the child they thought would grant them grandchildren, they don't have? So the legacy of our family dies with me. That's why I'm silent no more.
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