:: The S.I.C.L.E. Cell ::

:: Wednesday, May 04, 2005 ::

Many good comments regarding the post on "post-abortion healing":

Comment:
"I never questioned your anguish when I first read your story over a year ago, because I had a close friend who suffered from hyperemesis throughout her first pregnancy. I don't think her case was as severe as yours, but I saw firsthand the havoc it caused and the care she required to be able to go forward sometimes moment by moment through the nine months. I tell you this because my thought for you is that perhaps you scoff at healing because you haven't seen it firsthand.

I don't think you have a problem with 'healing'. I think you have a problem with cheap grace, as well you and all of us who fear God should! I know that the grief we feel is sacred and is of God and is appropriate; I also believe it can be lifted by sharing it with the One whose yoke is easy and whose burden is light."

Comment:
"Carol Everett was speaking once about her awakening to what abortion really was. She mentioned once holding an aborted baby in her hand and looking at the intestines and thinking, 'This baby was made to live.' She said, 'Those are the ones I remember and need healing for, every day.' Every day. Every day. Every day. Just those two words. Every day. That it's not a once and done deal. You don't just walk away and say, 'Well, I've seen the light, all is well.' Every day it's going back to God and saying, I can't carry this.'

Every day. Every day. Every day. I think that's something people don't grasp. I know I don't. I have to remind myself that for those who have been there, done that, it's every day. Every day. Every day. Every day."

Comment:
"[Though I don't have a SICLE] I do understand the not healing. I went through a thousand different kinds of hell as a child with my mother and abuse, starvation.. When I converted to catholicism, from paganism, I hoped when they baptized me it all would just wash off. It didn't.

Really and truly its absurd that people think God is going to disrupt his original design and bring us to the point where death does not offend us. We were not originally created to die. Our unborn were not created to be destroyed. Death is a consequence of the original stain.

I think that claiming full healing involves denial, and I do think it's damaging for those who think they are healed compleatly to go around telling people that. Death is an offense to our nature and to say that it doesnt bother one anymore says to me that God removed one's ability to be offended and hurt by death, which would be contrary to His original plan. And it's a bit crazy to hear someone claim that God altered His plan just for them.

when God is ready he will restore me to what he meant for me to be. Until then I respect the fact that my sin causes myself and others pain. Pain that doesnt heal with time. Wounds that dont close till God himself recreates me and restores me without my stain of original sin. I respect His plan and I will follow it."

Comment:
"Ashli, you said:
'Sidewalk counselors' frequently hear from mothers (who are entering abortion businesses to abort children) that they 'know' it is wrong but that Jesus will forgive them. Further, the logic is that they're really already forgiven before the abortion takes place.'

Isn't this kinda what sparked the Protestant Reformation? Josef Fuger was selling indulgences for sins you planned to commit later. For Luther, that was the last straw."

Comment:
"Ashli, I have been following your blog for a few weeks now after a friend of mine gave me the link. I love your honesty and up front manner of your experience and views of abortion. Yesterday's blog was so refreshing.

I too do not believe that a woman can find the true definition of 'healing' from an abortion. I have completed a CPC bible study/counselling, a Rachel Vineyards post abortion retreat and a Healing Hearts online post abortion bible study. Yes each of these 'helped' me through stages of my post abortion journey (as I call it) but they have not 'healed' me. I feel I have come a LONG way. However I do not consider myself 'healed'. I believe I find bits of peace and healing along the path but never will be the complete person I was before my abortion, I will always have grief and regret over the loss of my child.

I have accepted Christs forgiveness but also too sometimes doubt my own forgiveness and am told this is putting myself before Christ! I am involved in an online post abortion ministry, which I would suggest offers the model of 'healing' rather than 'helping' and this does sometimes annoy me.

God does not always heal us of things e.g. terminal illnesses, addictions etc, so why should abortion be different? You are right sin (abortion) has consequences and although we may be helped with the grief, pain and shame etc...I do not believe we can all be healed or gain full healing...I struggle to know how to describe myself...as I am not comfortable with 'healed' from my abortion."

Comment:
"I had some thoughts on why people push the 'healing' thing when it comes to abortion. I, for one, doubt that anyone really 'heals', as you said. How could you possibly heal from such a horrific experience? I think that really they are just trying to fool themselves so that they can pretend not to hurt anymore. Sometimes denial is much easier to accept than the truth.

I think that the healing message is so over-publicised because no one wants to tell a woman who just had an abortion, and is about to jump from a bridge, that she will probably never get better. People like to have hope, they like to give other people hope. Who cares if it isn't the truth, as long as it gives everyone a nice, fuzzy feeling? No one wants to look at the woman, with her brand new SICLE, and say "welcome to your personal hell, where you will stay for the rest of your life, with no chance of escape".

The truth sucks. The truth is that, like you, she may never feel better. It will always haunt her dreams and waking moments. She will always want to die when she thinks of what she did to herself and her child. Non-sicles (like me) are the LAST people in the world who should be telling her (or you) that you have to heal, that healing is the 'right thing'."

Comment:
"Ashli, I agree with you about "healing" programs. The program I went through was Hope Alive which was definitely about integrating abortion into my life and giving me tools to life my life differently.

I am very pleased with what I have learned in the program but I know very well I am not entirely healed and will not be this side of heaven. For now, I can be real and honest and put my hand and heart out to other women who have had abortions to encourage them.

I abhor the term, "post abortive" woman. I do not agree with defining any person in terms of any one sin, as we are all sinners guilty of many sins. I think of, and refer to myself (as well as others) as a woman who has had a abortion, and my perferred definition: a sinner saved by grace."

Proponents of abortion love to report that the predominant emotion women experience after abortion is relief. Opponents of abortion often reason that such reporting is no accurate indication of a woman's true and lasting emotional response, the kind that comes after she's had a fair amount of time to integrate what happened into her life.

It's true I think with all of the emotionally heavier things in life (i.e., things like marriage, divorce, birth, major illness, etc.), be they positive or negative: time is needed to absorb the impact they have on the whole.

I would suggest that the abortion-related coping programs are emotionally affective, and, having to do with the heavy abortion experience, are themselves pretty heavy. So it makes sense to me that an argument could be made that, until longitudinal follw-up can be performed on past participants, I'm not sure how accurate the claims of "healing" are. I have talked to those who say these programs were a productive weekend but, come Monday, the same old grief and despair was waiting on the doorstep to greet them.

Lots of interesting dialogue on the subject of these programs, "post-abortion healing" and terminology at Aa.

:: ashli 12:43 PM # ::
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