Amy Charlton: My mom tried to abort me three times

In September of 1975, a woman discovered that she was pregnant. Things were very difficult for her, as she was raising two sons, six and 15 years old. Their father had walked out on them and refused to help care for the boys financially, or in any other way. The only alternative for this woman, it seemed, was to abort this unexpected baby. After all, she could barely afford to feed the children she already had.

Between the months of September 1975 and January 1976, this woman had three therapeutic abortions in an attempt to rid herself of the unborn baby. These abortions, also known as a “salting out procedure” are performed by injecting a very large syringe into the woman’s abdomen, removing a certain amount of amniotic fluid out of the womb, and then injecting three times the amount of saline back in, thus “burning” the baby out. For reasons only God knows, these abortions did not take and on April 21, 1976, two months premature, her baby was born. The child was perfect and healthy, weighing four pounds, five ounces.

Unfortunately on March 16, 1977, the mother passed away, less than a year after her baby girl was born. After the woman’s death, the infant’s father and paternal grandmother took custody of the baby and her two brothers. As this baby girl grew up, her father told her about the three abortions she had undergone in her mother’s womb but this little girl never believed him, as she assumed that if a baby is aborted, he or she could not possibly survive.

The truth only came to this girl when she was eighteen years old, married, and approximately five months pregnant with her first child. This girl needed and soon obtained her mother’s medical records from the hospital that had treated her. Imagine her utter shock as she read about how her mother tried to terminate her unborn child three times. As the young girl read the medical documents, the new life inside of her was stirring and kicking as if to say “Mommy please don’t get any ideas.”

Today this young woman is 37 years old and is raising a family of her own. She is healthy and normal in every way, with no physical deformities of any kind.

I am the child that I have been writing about. My mother had no right to try and abort me, no matter what the circumstances were, no matter how inconvenient her pregnancy was. And if she was here with us today, I’m sure she would agree. Life is too precious to simply throw away. Now I can speak out against abortion from the baby’s perspective. Any baby would choose life.

— Amy