A Father’s Heartbreaking Abortion Experience
By: Sarah Terzo
Tags: Grief, Fatherhood, Abortion, Pro Life, Abortion Clinic

Recently, a man I will identify by the initials RDF shared on Facebook a heartbreaking story of loss.

His girlfriend was pregnant with twins. She was almost twenty weeks along when she went to Planned Parenthood, considering abortion. I will let him tell the story in his own words:

She went into Planned Parenthood because she was “too young” (24) and wasn’t ready for children. She hadn’t “planned” to be a parent… There were protesters there with posters and booklets and handouts… Offering insight, wisdom, help… an alternative to murder. She walked past the pictures of cut up babies. She ignored the small group of protesters. She was expressing her “legal rights”… Her life was about her. Not about the inconvenience of the “fertilized eggs” that were inside her. They weren’t babies yet. She was less than 20 weeks pregnant… by a few days. Though the Sonogram showed two little babies. With fingers and hands… And feet and faces… And heartbeats… Two little innocent babies who were being protected by their mother in the safety of her womb…Who were completely 100% innocent. Alive… Waiting to be born.

Preborn baby at 20 weeks. Photo by The Endowment for Human Development

The night before the abortion, we were talking about alternatives. I cried. She cried … I put my hand on her hand and then on her stomach and prayed and said, “Dear Lord, Please guide us through this dark and confusing hour. Please point us in the direction that only you know is right… Dear Lord…” And then we felt the strongest kick. And then another… And another. I cried. She cried. “The Lord is speaking to us. He answered our prayers.” She said, “But I’ve already made the appointment.” And I said, “That appointment means nothing, God has spoken to us.” I felt it. She said she felt it too. For the first time in her life… she felt God speaking to her. Later that night, we were talking about the future and future plans. She said, “I’m not ready to be a mother.” I told her that nobody is. She said, “I’m scared.” I told her that every mother is scared. Although she wasn’t enrolled in college at the time, she wanted to go. I was enrolled in a Bachelor’s Program and was working toward my degree. She said, “But I want to finish college and do something with my life.” I told her that I would help with the baby and somehow we’d both finish college. “It might be harder. We may have to make some sacrifices but we’ll get through it.” She said that she was going to college and I could stay home and watch the baby. I was working for Lockheed Martin at the time and a condition of my employment was that I had to be enrolled in a Bachelor’s Program. So we disagreed on who was going to finish college first… That morning I got up and was getting ready to go to work. I thought everything was going to be fine. We made it through the storm. She came downstairs and said, “I’m going through with it.” “What?” She said, “I’ve made up my mind. I’m going through with it.” She asked me to drive her to the clinic. I tried to reason with her. She wasn’t having it. I refused to take her. She called a cab. I thought to myself, “If I let her get in that cab, she’ll surely go through with it.” So I agreed to take her to Planned Parenthood in hopes of talking her out of it. She wasn’t having any of that. I tried to talk. She was silent. Not a word. I drove. She stared out the window. She was stubborn…nobody was going to tell her what to do… Not me… Not God… Nobody… I walked with her through the small group of protesters. I took a pamphlet and tried to give it to her. She was determined. I said, “Look those are fingers. That’s a head. They were alive. Our babies are alive.” She was walking briskly… She pretended she didn’t hear me. We got to the security gate of Planned Parenthood and rang the doorbell. A woman came out and unlocked the gate and then locked it behind us. We went into the lobby of the building. I grabbed my girlfriend’s hand, “Don’t do this.” She tried to pull her hand back and said, “I’m not ready to be a mother.” “Please, don’t do this. Reconsider” The lady who escorted us in told her the clinic was on the second floor. “Please, We can get through this. Don’t kill our babies.” She pulled her hand back, turned away from me and went up toward the clinic… Where were my rights? Where were the rights of those two beautiful babies? What in the hell did rights have to do with murder? Nobody has the right to murder!!! All of these thoughts flooded my emotions like a freight train… The moment my children were murdered, a ripple, a shockwave went through my body. Though I wasn’t there… I felt it. I knew something terrible had just happened in that moment.

The man went into the abortion facility to see his girlfriend in the recovery room:

My girlfriend was crying. She said, “I was wrong. I felt them when they died. They pulled my heart out with our babies.” I cried. She cried. She said, “Oh God, what have I done? I feel horrible, empty… I feel barren… Like a dead flower” I cried. She cried… We walked past the protesters. She could barely stand. She cried the whole way home. “Why didn’t I listen?” “What was I thinking?” And on and on and on… The emotional pain was unbearable.

RDF goes on to say that his girlfriend fell into a suicidal depression. She was soon going in and out of mental institutions. “It ruined her life,” he said.

When your rights… ruin your life… There is something wrong with the law.

He concludes:

It is a big deal. It is devastating to the mother. The little babies feel it. The mother feels it. The father feels it. It is murder.

Planned Parenthood, as well as other pro-abortion groups, have always fought very hard to prevent the father of the baby from having any influence, and they have been very successful.

Women are not even required to tell the father. In fact, a law that would have required the husbands of married women to be told about their wives’ pending abortions was found unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in Planned Parenthood v. Casey. A father does not have the right even to know about his partner’s abortion, much less stop it.

Louise Taylor, who was the vice president of medical affairs at Planned Parenthood, summed up Planned Parenthood’s attitude towards the fathers of aborted babies in an article in Time magazine titled “Sharing the Pain of Abortion”:

But it doesn’t matter how much men scream and holler that they are being left out [of the abortion decision] There are some things that they are never going to be able to experience fully. I say, tough luck.

Tough luck, Planned Parenthood says.

That is their answer to broken fathers like this one.