I was that person who said silly things like, "I wouldn't tell any other woman what to do, but I, personally, would never have an abortion." And then I did.

I was 27 and less than 18 months earlier I had taken my 4 children and ran away from their violent and controlling father. 

Then I fell in love with someone who didn't love me and in my dejection, I had a drunken one night stand with a stranger. The next morning, I knew I was pregnant. I'd had enough experience. This was in 1984; the pregnancy tests were not as accurate as they are now. I kept getting a false negative. Hope would rise up in me and then my body would tell me the truth.

Why couldn't I accept this child? Because I believed I had no worth in myself. My children only had worth because I had loved their father. It was this that allowed me to love them. I didn't even know the father of this new child growing in my body let alone love him so how could I love his child? 

This was my distorted thinking and in my mind the worst thing I could do was bring a child into the world and not love it. I knew what that was like. Deep in myself was the wish that I had never been born. And so I killed my child. The evil of that decision gnawed away silently at my life, but it would be 33 years before I allowed the enormity of it to enter my heart.