A Family Tragedy

By Olivia Gans

Editor's note. This story and the piece reprinted below from the Weekly Standard both critique an amazing first-person account that ran in the July 7 New York Times magazine.

Ever since I read the anonymous July 7, 2002, editorial entitled "Family Planning," I have been on a roller coaster of rage and tears for a young girl I may never meet. None the less I know her as well as I know myself. A young lady so violated and ignored that even her last desperate cry for respect and support went totally unheard even by her own parents.

Almost 30 years of abortion and the myths about freedom of choice have come full circle as the first generations to reach maturity after Roe v. Wade are now trying to live with our decisions. Decisions that often demand that others do as we did so that we can keep on believing it was the right thing to do.

In the case of this tragic young girl's story the roar of justification, selfishness, and denial of all those around her drowned out her own lonely voice. All her feeble attempts to have her wishes respected went unheard. In the end, she cried out, as her own father admits, but in cowardice refused to hear, "I have no choice!"

My heart felt an ache so piercing for her as I recalled the voices that surrounded me when I was a student and pregnant in 1981. Over and over I was told how childish and stupid it would be for me to give birth to my own child. Planned Parenthood counselors and four abortionists told me to do what my boyfriend wanted because "Since I was pregnant I couldn't think clearly for myself"!

The women who surrounded this poor, young girl are all women I know. Since 1982 I have listened to hundreds of women just like them all over the USA. I have heard the same defiant ones struggle to justify bad and irreversible decisions. The urgency which so many of us bring to this issue is quite disturbing. Many have even become leaders in pro-abortion groups. So much energy is spent making what was so awful somehow feel right. Even sometimes by forcing our own children into the same hopeless situation with no regard for the scars we will burn into their hearts.

I have held still more of these women as they cried tears that never seem to cease. I have worked side by side with those brave ones who have struggled to find real peace by telling the truth about the devastation that their abortions caused in their lives and families. The truth that for so many of us is so very hard to hear. The abortion actually never solves any real problems because the baby wasn't really the problem. Our abortions just left us with painful memories of children that stay with us, haunting our hearts until we find the deeper strength to acknowledge our pain and take responsibility for their deaths.

The father of this desperate young girl speaks of his daughter's struggle so carelessly. In the same way, he seems to be oblivious to his own selfishness. A self-centeredness that saw the possibility of helping to raise his own grandchild as a sentence of hard labor. Does their daughter already sense that they feel the same way about her?

Clearly his daughter is in deep trouble. Just how many times does a child have to flaunt dangerous behavior under her parents' noses before they stop their own wheels long enough to help? Getting pregnant was not the problem. It was only the result. It could also have been a chance for true strength and growth. Tragically for her, her parents had not been able to turn off their own self- interest long enough to embrace and anchor a troubled and frightened daughter. Alone, she struggled to protect herself and her own child, their grandchild, from a hostile world they helped to create!

How long will this sad country deny the damage we have done to our entire culture by promoting abortion? Railroading so many isolated and hopeless young women into believing that they have no choice except to have an abortion? Abortion is always a hopeless choice. Women and their children deserve so much more.

Ironically this father claims that he has hope for his child and that he knows what is in her heart. He tells us of a compassionate child who gave of herself lovingly and bravely to a dying friend. How sad for her that her own father and mother refused their own little girl the same generous support and care when her moment of need came.

Her father says he believes that the same happy, loving girl will come home to him someday. Well, she did and he wasn't home for her. His cowardly and heartless rejection of her wishes to save her baby, his grandchild, will never be far from her memories.

Olivia L. Gans is the director of American Victims of Abortion.