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

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

Sheila Harper

When Sheila Harper reflected on the facility in Tennessee where she had an abortion in March 1985, she said it smelled like vomit. She remembers sitting in a room filled with girls all waiting to have an abortion. They all wore hospital gowns, with some sitting on the floor of the cramped room.

At the time, Harper was 19 years old and eight weeks pregnant. She told CP that she must have learned about the pregnancy a month before the abortion. The father of her child, who had begged her not to abort, did not take her to the facility. Harper was brought there by a female friend who was a year older than she was.

"She told me that abortion was no big deal, that she had had one at 15," Harper said. "And that was part of the reason why I justified the decision, because I thought, 'Well, if she did it at 15 and was OK' … that's what kept going through my head."

Harper can remember the day of her abortion as if it only happened yesterday. When she arrived for the appointment, Harper said she gave the facility a fake name, and the staff didn't ask for any identification. She remembered paying $250 for the abortion, saying the facility only dealt with cash.

"They told me that I would get some counseling, and I was so excited because I thought, 'somebody is going to tell me something else I could do,'" Harper said. "Because I never dreamed that I would end up at an abortion clinic."

The staff called her into an office, and Harper tried to find the words to describe the woman she met with, telling CP the counselor just seemed "dead." As soon as the door closed, Harper said that she burst into tears, and the woman asked her, "Do you want this abortion?"

"And I said, 'I don't know any other choice.' As I sobbed, I just kept thinking she was going to give me information that was going to help me," Harper said. "And she didn't. She wrote the number two on a card and handed it to me, and said, 'Go sit down out there. They'll call your number in a moment.'"

"That was it. That was the extent of my counseling," she continued.

Feeling as if there was no hope, Harper decided to go through with the abortion. By the time the staff called her back, the room where she was seated had filled up with other girls who were there for abortions.

She reflected on the other girls there that day, and Harper said that they were all like her, roughly the same age and about to have an abortion. As for the procedure itself, Harper said that it was "excruciatingly painful" and "humiliating."

When it was over, she said the nurses told her to get up and leave the room, but she couldn't even stand, let alone walk. Harper said that two nurses dragged her to the recovery room and laid her on a bean bag chair.

Two weeks after her abortion, Harper's boyfriend ended their relationship, and she told CP that she knew the breakup was because he couldn't look at her anymore.

"And I don't blame him," she said. "I deserved much worse."

After praying that one day she would have the chance to talk to him again and apologize, around 2010, Harper's old boyfriend reached out to her through Facebook. She sent him a message, apologizing and explaining how the abortion had impacted her life.

For years after the abortion, Harper endured what she described as "seven years of Hell," falling prey to drug and alcohol abuse, and her emotions spiraled out of control. After marrying in 1988, she told her husband about the abortion a year and a half into their marriage, and the couple felt they had discovered the reason Harper carried such negative emotions.

They looked through the phone book and found a counselor, but Harper said that speaking with a mental health professional only added to her stress. Around the third or fourth visit, she disclosed that she had an abortion. She said the counselor could not believe that Harper regretted the decision.

"And when she acted like that, I thought, 'I really am crazy,'" she said. "Because I was looking at this professional woman as someone who knows what she's talking about, and I thought I really must be crazy if I have these regrets."

One day in 1992, Harper was driving when she heard a commercial on the radio for a local pregnancy center, which was called AAA Women's Services but is now known as Choices. The commercial discussed a class for women struggling after an abortion, and after standing the center up at least three times, Harper found the courage to attend.

The class consisted of a Bible study, and as someone who had felt isolated after her abortion, Harper did not expect to meet anyone who could empathize with what she had gone through.

"But on the very first night of that class, all the people in that class were telling my story," she said. "And so then I realized I'm not crazy. This really is a thing. People do suffer after an abortion, and that's what got my attention and made me keep coming back to class."

"I was so shocked and thrilled to find people who understood what I was going through," she added.

Harper said she underwent a miraculous transformation due to the abortion recovery program, and she welcomed Christ fully into her life. While she knew God existed at the time of the abortion, she admitted that she had never paid attention to Him unless she needed to call on Him in troubled times.

While she was working with the pregnancy center, the facility where she had an abortion permanently closed its doors, and it exists now as the National Memorial for the Unborn.

Completing the healing program also filled Harper with a desire to give back, and she started teaching an abortion recovery class through the pregnancy center. In 2000, God placed a calling on her heart to begin an organization of her own, which she called Save One.

The nonprofit helps men and women who have been hurt by abortion tell their stories so that others who may be considering one will hear their testimonies and not go through with their decision to abort.

"I kept hearing people say at every class I taught if I could just save one unborn baby, I would be willing to tell my story," the nonprofit founder said about how she came up with the name Save One. "And I knew God was speaking to me through that phrase."

With the reversal of Roe v. Wade, Harper believes that it's crucial for the pro-life movement to be unified, regardless of whether someone approaches the issue from a religious or secular perspective.

"The unity causes an anointing that breaks the yokes of bondage; the word tells us that," she said. "And so, I feel like if we were more unified and accepting of each other and we weren't broken off working in all these silos, I feel like we would have a louder voice."