Women share their abortion stories: 'The life was just sucked out of me, too'

By Samantha Kamman, Christian Post Reporter Saturday, February 10, 2024

Deborah Tilden

Deborah Tilden remembers the now-closed Lovejoy Clinic in Portland, Oregon, where she had an abortion, was "cold," with staff herding women from one room to the next as if it were a "cattle call."

Tilden told CP she was 18 years old and engaged to be married to the father of her baby when she had the abortion. Tilden's fiancé had returned to Alaska, and she was still in Oregon when she learned that she was pregnant in September 1980.

"We had a brief phone call, and the solution was abortion," she told CP. "He sent me the money — it was $300 at the time — and we were just going to cover up our little secret. You know, back then, people weren't talking about abortion healing; there were no pregnancy resource centers. And people weren't talking about it, about the aftermath."

The couple told a small group of close friends about the pregnancy but kept it a secret for the most part. As Tilden explained, she was a church girl at the time, and she was afraid of what could happen if others learned that she was pregnant.

"There was a couple in our church who were several years older than me who had been engaged, and they became pregnant," the post-abortive woman remembered. "And the pastor put them in front of the entire congregation and exposed what they had done."

The memory of what happened to that couple made Tilden fearful that the same thing would happen to her if anyone from church learned that she was pregnant.

On Oct. 10, 1980, Tilden went to the Lovejoy Clinic for an abortion. She told CP that she was around nine weeks pregnant at the time.

"You go into these abortion clinics, and they prey on fear; they prey on your vulnerability," Tilden said. "'Nobody has to know; it's not a baby yet; it's just a blob of tissue. Life can get back to normal."

She recalls sitting in a white room with the blinds drawn and the sound of the women beside her quietly sobbing as the staff shushed them. Tilden told CP that the abortion facility employees were trying to keep everyone quiet as they moved them through the process.

"It was just very cold," she said. "It felt like it was a cattle call. It was just a room full of women, and they kept moving them down the hallway to where the procedures were done."

Tilden never consulted with a doctor until he came into the room to conduct the abortion. After it was over, Tilden said that she felt as if she were in a fog. She also recalled that the facility never followed up with her after the abortion was done.

"I really just shut down emotionally," she said about how she felt post-abortion. "There was just a lot of self-destructive behaviors for about the next seven years. Drugs and alcohol, you know, just things to cope. I became obsessed with exercise, and I would spend three hours at the gym."

She eventually married her fiancé, and for the next 23 years, neither one of them spoke about the abortion. The couple went ahead with planning their wedding after the abortion, but, according to Tilden, there was this block between them, and they nearly divorced during their first year of marriage.

"We had no understanding whatsoever that it had anything to do with our abortion," she said.

The couple lived in Carson City, Nevada, for four years, and Tilden shared her abortion story with a pastor and another church friend who wanted to start a program for post-abortive women in the church.

During a meeting with the pastor's wife to discuss starting an abortion-recovery program through the church, the pastor's wife referred Tilden to Beauty for Ashes. The program is a retreat for post-abortive women to find healing from their abortion experiences. Tilden attended the retreat in 1999 to gain insight into how to operate an abortion healing program.

"I wept the entire weekend," the post-abortive woman recalled. "I thought it would be very different, but, you know, God sometimes has to set things up for us to walk through the doors of something."

While she did not start an abortion recovery program through her church, Tilden ended up participating in Beauty for Ashes four years in a row after that first retreat. The final year that she went, Tilden brought her husband with her, and the retreat served as a restorative weekend for them both.

Around this time, Tilden was introduced to the Silent No More Awareness Campaign, a pro-life group that helps post-abortive women share their abortion stories. She formerly served as an Oregon Regional Coordinator for the pro-life group before moving to Montana. She is the co-creator of LifeVictory Coaching, a program that helps clients realize their full potential.

In 2002, Tilden and her husband were living in Sacramento, California, and Tilden would eventually share her abortion testimony on the steps of the California state capitol.

Her healing journey continued when, afterward, the director of the Sacramento Pregnancy Resource Center approached Tilden and invited her to attend a Forgiven and Set Free post-abortion Bible study.

"When you look at the process of going through the healing from an abortion, I felt like I was just a caterpillar crawling on the ground, just barely existing," she said. "But when you go through that healing, I felt like a butterfly that had been released to do so much more of what I was meant to do in the first place."