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Wounds Are Where the Light Shines Through
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Malinda
Ontario,
Canada
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Wounds Are Where the Light Shines Through
Code RSC 1985, c C-46, at paras. 137 and 139, S231 (3) of Canada’s Criminal Code defines murder as when the taking of a life is planned and deliberate. Contractual murder is when murder is planned and deliberated, and when it is committed pursuant to an arrangement under which money or anything of value passes or is intended to pass from one person to another, or is promised by one person to another, as consideration for that other person causing or assisting in causing the death of anyone or counseling another person to do any act causing or assisting in the causing that death. I have contractually murdered.
I ended the lives of two children, babies actually. Once when I was 19 and again when I was 21, about fifteen months apart. The first one was a boy with light brown curly hair and blue eyes and the second a girl with dark hair and brown eyes. These details I am guessing but, listen, and I will tell you why I believe this to be true and how it all happened.
It was 1976 and I was 19 years old. I sat in a doctor’s office waiting to be called to the examining room to meet with the doctor to discuss some tests I had taken. As I sat in nervous anticipation I noticed directly across from me, on a wall, was a painting. It was a painting of a young girl from the waist up. She had shoulder length dark brown hair that had some wave to it. She had an oval shaped face with a medium dark complexion. Her eyes were brown, perhaps hazel, and she looked to be about 20 years old. The strange thing was that she looked like me. In her arms she held a baby about ten months old. The artist had clearly defined the child as a boy. The baby had curly light brown hair and bluish green eyes. The both of them looked like there was perhaps native blood in them. I say this because of the way the artist had so carefully chiseled their features and detailed their clothing with the paintbrush. I was mesmerized, hypnotized, and captivated by this painting. I could not take my eyes off of it. The painting spoke of strength and survival that can only come with love. All this I could see in the young mother’s eyes. Although I looked like the young woman in the painting, I definitely was not her.
I had not been feeling well lately, and I had not had my period in a while. Could I be pregnant? Could there be a life inside of me? Really? I was such a loser, I thought. I had been living with a man for the past six months and had missed taking my birth control pills a few times because they made me quite sick.
I thought about my best friend who had gotten pregnant the year before. She got rid of it. She had an abortion. Her boyfriend, she, and I drove down to Agsdenburg, New York for the procedure. I have no idea how that was arranged, but I went along at her request. It was creepy. We went into an old building and into a dingy office. We left her there and went into the car and waited. Lunchtime came, so her boyfriend and I went to a restaurant to eat. Then we went back to the car and waited some more. Finally, she was done. We drove home in silence. When we got home to the apartment we all shared we put her to bed, which was a mattress on the floor. Later that night the medication they gave her wore off, and she started to cry and writhe in pain. She could have died that night, but she didn’t. The next day she was a little better and she recovered a couple of weeks after that. Nobody told us this was wrong. All the women’s magazines, the television shows, and the newspapers said it was our right as women to decide what we wanted and didn’t want in our lives and in our bodies. We were liberated women now. We were told that a fetus was just a lump of flesh, and we decided when that lump of flesh became a life. It all was quite convenient for a nineteen-year-old girl who seemed stuck with an unwanted pregnancy. Nobody talked about responsibility or consequences for such a decision.
Faintly, in the background, I heard my name being called. Forcing my eyes off of that painting I heard myself answer weakly, “Here.” I stood up, grabbed my purse, and followed a nurse into the examining room. A few moments later the doctor hurried in and said, “Well, you’re pregnant”. “Do you want to keep it?” he asked. “No” I said. “No, how could I, possibly” was the real response that was in my head. He proceeded to go on about how I had come to the right doctor, because he could refer me to the Civic Hospital and there would be no problems receiving an abortion there. I got the feeling that he was telling me he was well connected. I was relieved that it would be done here in Ottawa and in a hospital. Don’t get me wrong. I had given this some thought. In my uninformed and twisted thinking this was the only way for me. In my mind I was saving a child’s life, not ending it. I was nineteen and had been living with a man for about six months. He was a taxi driver and worked crazy hours. I had just landed myself a job at the Bank of Canada. We smoked hashish and pot daily. We drank regularly. We did hard drugs frequently, and we partied constantly. We didn’t know if we loved each other, and the relationship was a day-to-day thing. We were addicts with benefits.
To me, bringing up a child in this environment would only be cruel to the child. To go through with the pregnancy and continue in the lifestyle I was in would only lead to disaster for a child. It was a lose/lose situation. I would only be doing this child harm if I were to let it be born because a change of lifestyle was not an option it seemed. What child deserved this? To start off a life with such a loser for a mother was not fair. How many times had I asked myself why on earth was I born? At my own birth I had a twin. The twin did not survive. How many times did I wish it were me who had died instead? No, I would definitely not go through with this pregnancy. We set the date for the abortion. It would happen in one week. In a few hours I would be lighting up a joint, having a drink, and none of this would matter—or so I thought, because here I am now forty years later coming to terms with that decision.
While setting the date with the doctor for the abortion I noticed something I had never noticed before about him. He had two gold rings with very large diamonds on one hand and some other unidentifiable, by me, precious stone mounted on gold as well on the other. He was very tanned and looking very slick. Almost like a successful businessman.
I left the examining room and walked through the waiting room, and I noticed the place was full. Patients were sitting in the hall and on the stairs because there was no room left to sit down. Business must be booming I thought. Little did I know how much truth there was to that statement until recently.
As the week went by I would catch myself thinking about that painting in the doctor’s office. You know, the one of the young woman that looked like me holding a baby with curly brown hair and bluish green eyes. Is that what my boy would have looked like I wondered? What? “My boy”? Really? This was never meant to be. This was an accident. I had to believe this. I also had to believe that this was not a baby but merely a lump of flesh, just a fetus. Not even a human yet right? I felt like I was going crazy. It’s quite amazing when you think about it what you can make yourself believe when you desperately need to justify your fears and actions so that you can live with yourself. So, I just kept on thinking of what kind of pathetic mother I would make. No child deserved me. It was better this way.
The day finally came. It was 5:30AM when we left for the hospital. Outside it was cold and dark just like my heart. We drove to the hospital in silence. My live-in boyfriend walked me into the clinic. We said goodbye. He kissed me and squeezed my hand. The nurse at the front desk said she would call him later on when I was ready to come home. We parted ways, and I could not help but notice that he seemed confused and sad. I wondered why. Shouldn’t he be relieved!
I turned around and walked into oblivion without a single word or goodbye to the life that was in me. They prepared for the procedure. The painting crossed my mind again just before I drifted off into unconsciousness. Then, more quickly and coldly than I could have ever imagined without any knowledge of how this procedure would take place, it was done.
I went home that evening and got high. I picked up my life exactly where I left off and continued on a downward spiral of alcohol, drugs, and partying. I grabbed onto anything that would help me stay numb. This was my life.
Two years went by and once again I was sick in the mornings and late with my period. It didn’t take long for me to figure out that, yes, I was pregnant again. Birth control pills still made me sick; therefore I had missed them on a couple of occasions. I was still working at the Bank of Canada, and we had a nurse’s office in the building with a nurse on staff full time. They had a room with some beds in it in case an employee felt ill and wanted to lie down some. While in that room one morning, after being there several mornings before, the nurse asked me if I was pregnant. I said yes, that I was pretty sure I was. She asked me if I wanted to go through with the pregnancy. “No, I can’t,” I told her. She said she had the name of a doctor who performed abortions at the Civic Hospital and asked if I would like her to make an appointment to see him. “Yes,” I said and that was all it took. The devil’s timing is quick, precise, and deadly. Before I knew it I had an appointment at the hospital again for yet another abortion. Within a couple of weeks I was back at hell’s door.
One night during my week’s wait to go to the hospital I had a dream. I was chasing a little girl. She was about two years old. She had straight shoulder length brown hair and big brown eyes. She was running from me laughing the whole time, and I was chasing her and laughing, too. The dream only lasted seconds but, like the painting, it remains in my mind thirty-eight years later.
I can’t tell you much more about this abortion because it was even quicker and colder than the first one and part of me is still ashamed that I cannot remember more, yet I understand that this voluntary loss of memory is what helped me to survive for many, many, years. You see I don’t think I could have handled the truth at this time nor the shame and regret for what I had done. I still believed without a doubt that I would have been the worst thing that could happen to any child. You see, I didn’t know God, and I didn’t know what God could do in a person’s life. All I had was my own reasoning. There was no one telling me to rethink or look at other options. I had always believed that there was a God and as much as I believed that, I believed that there was absolutely no way He could love me after everything I had done.
The reason why I am talking about this now, instead of the miracle of how I came to Christ, how Jesus turned my world upside down so all the crap would fall out, and then how He turned it right side up again, is because, of all the sins I have committed, this one still clings to me, hurting me and making me unable to see myself through God’s eyes.
I speak about this part of my life because there is an urgency that needs to be talked about. I have carried this inside for forty years, and I can’t help but wonder what other women are there who are doing the same. Are there any? This question led me to doing some research on abortion.
I started my search on the Internet for abortion statistics. I was shocked and appalled. The statistics came from Statistics Canada so there were as reliable as they were going to get. The volume of statistics over the years became too much work for that department so they gave the task of collecting those statistics to an organization called The Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI).
You see, in 1988 when abortions became legal, the Federal Government wanted statistics to be kept because now provincial governments would now have to pay for this procedure; therefore monies had to be accounted for. Only one province to this day has held out on performing abortions legally and that is Prince Edward Island. I am sad to say that on March 31st of this year 2016 PEI gave way to pressure and made abortions legal. The statistics I am about to give you are almost unbelievable. There were times when I was reading them that I broke down and wept. Please realize that these statistics are submitted on a voluntary basis, meaning that it is not mandatory for hospitals and clinics to submit records, so in fact they are higher than represented.
They are as follows:
• In 1988 abortions became legal in Canada
• Approximately 42 million abortions occur around the world every year
• An average of 100,000 of those occur in Canada every year
• Between 1970 and 2016, 3,816,645 babies lost their lives to abortion in Canada. These statistics do not include Quebec as they are voluntarily supplied and Quebec has decided not to contribute these numbers until recently. BC’s statistics are also incomplete due to voluntary reporting therefore, numbers are actually higher. You do not need parental consent to have an abortion in BC.
• In 2014, the latest year recorded, the Canadian Institute (CIHI) reported there were 81,897 abortions performed in Canada, 23,746 were in Ontario.
• Approximately 275 (reported) abortions occur each day in Canada, 12 every hour, and 1 abortion every 5 minutes
• Canada spends about $70 million dollars annually and approximately $200,000.00 a day on abortion services. 68% of Canadians are opposed to funding abortions on demand
• Less than 1% of abortions are hard cases of rape and incest and approximately 3% of abortions are committed for health risks to the mother
• 49% of abortions occur when babies are between 9 to 12 weeks when the child has a heartbeat, brainwaves, waving arms and legs, finger prints, swallows, wrinkle it’s forehead, sleeps, wakes, moves and urinates in utero
• About 20,000 pregnant teenagers have abortions in Canada each year.
• Today abortions are primarily used as birth control
• There are no restrictions in Canada for abortions. They can be done at any time of the pregnancy and for any reason.
• There is a desperate shortage of newborn babies available for adoption in Canada
• Fathers of the expectant mothers can also play an important role in the health of the unborn child. In fact, a study in1988 conducted by Westney, Cole and Munford, suggest that the expectant mother is more strongly influenced by input from the birth father than from any other significant person, including other relatives and health care professionals.
• A fetus is not considered to have any rights and a baby is not considered a life until it leaves the mother’s body. Code (R.S.C., 1985, c. C-46), Section 223(1) of Canada’s Criminal Code says that a child becomes a human being when it has "completely proceeded, in a living state, from the body of its mother.” In other words, the child has no protection until after birth.
• The acceptance of abortion in Canada is now evolving into acceptance of infanticide. Infanticide occurs when a female person commits a willful act or omission and causes the death of her newly born child. Yet, according to Canada’s criminal code, once born and physically surviving after leaving the mother’s body, these survivors are to be accorded all legal rights, including medical treatment however, a government report shows that these born children who survive abortions are killed by drugs, strangulation or just left to die. Some of the children survive in spite of this. During the years of 2000 to 2009, 491 children survived abortions and their lives were terminated. When three members of parliament, Leon Benoit, Maurice Vellacot, and Wladyslaw Lizon wrote a letter to the RCMP to bring this to their attention and stated that there should be 491 homicides under investigation for these children, they were ignored.
• I worked for ten years with some of Canada’s top biologists and chemists, and it is really hard to get scientists to agree on most things except when you ask the question, “When does human life begin?” Science tells us that human life begins at the time of conception. From the moment fertilization takes place, the child’s genetic makeup is already complete. Its gender has already been determined, its height, its hair and eye colour. The only thing the embryo needs to become a fully functioning being is the time to grow and develop.
Why do I bring this to your attention? Because, since 1970, 3,816,645 babies lost their lives to abortion. That’s almost 4,000,000 babies in 46 years. As I have previously stated, the statistics I have used come from Statistics Canada and CIHI. I refrained from using statistics from Pro-Life or Pro-Choice groups and newspapers, because I wanted to use records that came from objective sources. These statistics are not acceptable. My point is to just make you aware.
Here is something else of interest concerning adoption in Canada. As mentioned there is a shortage of children to adopt and a study done at the University of California-Berkeley School of Law shows that over the past ten years Canadian parents have adopted more than 1,000 American-born children. From 1999 to 2009 a total of nearly 21,000 children have been adopted internationally and, during that same time frame, there was 1,103,049 abortions performed in Canada.
You see, we talk about playing Pokémon Go, we talk about our Prime Minister and his affinity towards taking selfies, and we talk about changing all our toilets to being gender neutral because all these things are, sadly enough, front page stories in our newspapers but do we talk about the almost four million babies that have lost their lives to abortion in this country in the past 46 years or the 82,000 thousand babies whose lives were terminated last year? Should they not be topic of discussion as well? Are their lives not worth discussion or debate? What about their rights? These are questions that need to be asked. As I have said previously, all I want to do is to make you aware and bring to your attention that for many years women have been hearing that it is all about us, our rights, our bodies, our life, our decision. We need to wake up! This is a booming business. There are approximately 47 clinics and hospitals combined performing abortions in Canada. If you were to divide the revenue amongst them it would be around $8,000.00 a day for each of them, at the very minimum. That is a low estimate because these are reported abortions and no facility is required to provide any data. No, it’s not about us and hasn’t been for a very long time.
What could you possibly do about this? The next time you vote for somebody check to see what their stance on abortion is. Talk about it, especially to those younger than ourselves, men and women. You don’t have to put people down but maybe you can let them know what you have learned. There are establishments in Ottawa that offer assistance to women considering abortion by showing them what their other alternatives are. Most importantly, we can all pray. Pray that in this country one child every week will not lose their life to abortion, then two, then three. Pray that doctors and technicians in clinics in this city will not be able to stomach this procedure any longer and speak up and remove themselves. Pray that they would get physically sick while performing this procedure and be overwhelmed with peace when they think of walking away from it. You can be very creative with your prayers. I don’t think God will mind. I can tell you now you will not see an answer to your prayers on this earth, but the Lord will show you every life your prayers saved when you get to heaven. I believe that to be true.
Do I still consider myself a murderer? No. I remember what Jesus said on the cross, “Forgive them Father, they know not what they do”. I did not know what I was doing. Had I known half of what I know now about right and wrong I would not have made such a decision. It’s taken almost forty years to forgive myself, but you know when God forgave me? He forgave me over two thousand years ago when Jesus allowed Himself to be nailed on that cross for me.
So many years I have tried to climb on that cross in different ways to punish myself for what I did, putting myself down, believing that everything that went wrong in life was because it was what I deserved and not being able to see good in me. It wasn’t until recently that I was able to identify the source, the root of this behavior. How many teachings and sermons have I heard on forgiveness! Oh, but that was for forgiving someone else. Wasn’t it? I didn’t believe I deserved to be at peace with myself! Then one day I heard God ask me, “Do you believe I have forgiven you”? “Yes” I said because everything I had learned about Him said He would forgive any sin I had truly repented. Then He said, “Is it then not arrogant to not forgive yourself after I gave up my Son’s life so that you can live the life I gave you and enjoy the person I made you? Look around you and see that I have replaced what the locusts have eaten, as my word promises.” So, I took a look around and what did I see? I saw a husband who loved and respected me and then it hit me like a ton of bricks. I had a little boy with light brown curly hair and green/blue eyes. My mind went back to a certain painting in a doctor’s office. I also had a little girl who had straight dark brown, hair who loved to run so I could chase her. A certain dream I had in the past about chasing a little dark haired girl came to mind. Unable to have children due to abortions, my husband and I, with God’s leading, embarked on a journey of adoption. We applied with Children’s Aid of Ottawa and, within ten months, we had our son, Philip. He was one year old. Within another three months we had his baby sister. She was one week old when I first held her in my arms. I was floored. How dare I not forgive myself after what God had done for me? That was the beginning of my journey of learning to forgive myself.
I would like to tell you it happened overnight, but that would not be true. It has only been since the last couple of years that I have been really able to feel at peace with myself and mostly since in the past year since I have been here at Vanier Church. You see, here I don’t feel like I will be judged. In this past year I also have heard from God that I need to acknowledge two lives that were here on this earth and in me. I need to understand that they were welcomed with open arms in heaven and that I will meet them someday. I needed to somehow find out the days of those abortions and determine when they were conceived. With that information I could then once a year for each child prayerfully acknowledge their short lives on this earth. Already I was starting to feel the healing God was providing for me, and I was beginning to understand the devastation of abortion.
I had to do some research for myself, and I desperately needed God’s help. I prayed and asked for His direction. I was led to call the Records Department at the Civic Hospital where the abortions were done and found out what I had to do. I had to write a request for the information I wanted, provide copies of ID, and include a $40.00 cheque. I did so immediately. I was told it would take several weeks because the records going back that far were on microfilm, and the reader was broken but someone was coming in to fix it in two weeks. As I waited I decided to go online to find out what I could on my own about abortion procedures, laws, and statistics. That is how I was able to provide this information.
After researching the statistics, God put it on my heart to regularly make trips to the Civic Hospital and walk around it any pray that one baby a week would not die from abortion. That one mother’s mind would change and she would not be able to go through with it. That one mother’s heart would break for the child in her and see that nine months of her life in exchange for this child’s life would be worth the sacrifice. I have every second Friday off at my work so that is what I decided to with those mornings. There have been times I have not been physically able to go there, but that doesn’t stop me from taking time out to pray on those days. I truly believe God is answering my prayers.
Six months, four trips back to the Records Department, two instances of broken microfilm readers, and two instances of not “enough staff,” and I am still waiting for one set of records. I received records in the mail for one abortion but not the second, yet. I hear God telling me, “Don’t give up.” I see it on t-shirts, billboards, license plates, even commercials on TV. He will use whatever it takes to get my attention it seems.
The world around us is so dark now that we can lose sight of how close the darkness really is. It seems like the battle is always “over there.” I can tell you it is not underdeveloped middle-eastern countries that are terminating the lives of millions of unborn babies, it countries like Canada, United States, Australia, Great Britain, and it is a matter of inconvenience, mostly. There is also a serious lack of communication and provision for young women who have to deal with unplanned pregnancy. The only thing our government seems to want to offer is to have tax payers pay for abortions as that seems, to most, the only, the easiest, and the best way. Adoption is rarely considered in most cases.
What does God have to say about all of this? In the Bible God says that He knew us while we were still in our mother’s womb. Psalm 139:16 says that He saw us even before we were born. Verse 15 says He watched us being formed in utter seclusion therefore, does that not tell us that He considers us beings, while we are still in the womb, as somebody even before we left our mother’s body and were able to breathe on our own. To me that says that at the moment of conception He knows our name.
I have to wonder, and I hope you do too, what will the real cost be to us a nation for this? Only God knows and that is why I will be silent no more!
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