David MacDonald Story

‘Nowhere to go’: Former ‘Cats’ Broadway actor describes heartbreak after abortion

A former rising star on Broadway has shared how the abortion of his child sent him on a downward spiral that engulfed him in despair. Canadian performer David MacDonald, 50, gave his testimony at a gathering of Silent No More Awareness following Canada’s March for Life in 2011, where several other men and women also described their abortion trauma.

Once a powerful singer, MacDonald’s voice at the podium sometimes barely rose above a squeak – his vocal cords destroyed, he says, because of the stress he suffered following the abortion of his girlfriend’s baby when MacDonald was 21.

When MacDonald first learned his girlfriend was pregnant, he thought abortion was the obvious answer.

“I didn’t want to hear that [she was pregnant], you see … I didn’t want the responsibility, I wanted the sex,” he said. “And so the easy way out was abortion. That’s what I thought. Just pay $300 and the problem goes away.

“Life is priceless. You can’t put a price on it. I tried to put a price of $300 on my child’s life. It didn’t work.”

MacDonald said his girlfriend was “completely devastated” by the abortion, which also drove MacDonald deeper into a life of drugs and promiscuity. “There’s nowhere to go when you’ve made a mistake like that and you don’t know Jesus, so I just kept running to all these different places,” he said.

MacDonald said that he met success co-starring in movies for Paramount and Columbia Pictures, and landed a “dream job” as the Rock & Roll Cat in the US National Tour of “Cats.” But his career came to an abrupt halt one day when he pushed his voice far too hard despite being sick.

“That was the end of my voice, and that was the end of my career,” he said.

The journey to healing from the abortion, he said, was “a long, long, long hard road, but it began with getting on my knees. My life was without God, and without God you have nothing.”