By Rita McInerney

Maggie was 26 and six weeks pregnant. “I bought the lie: It will be all over and you can forget about it.” Instinctively, she says now, “I felt something was wrong, I didn’t want to. I felt that this was a reasonable choice.” The choice, for her, was abortion.

Today, years later, in the cozy library of her colonial style home in Cobb County, she can talk about the abortion and the tormented years that followed. She is speaking out in the hope that her experience can persuade another woman to say “no” to abortion, or to reassure someone suffering remorse for having one, that spiritual healing is possible.

Healing feelings of guilt and worthlessness is a slow process, the mother of two girls and a boy says with a knowledge engraved by bitter experience. She speaks quickly, her words pour out with the urgency she feels. She says she won’t “play word games” about abortion. To her, it’s “murder. You can legalize it, put it on the books, but it’s murder.”

Maggie is a friendly woman, with light blue eyes and soft brown hair. As she sits in her blue wing chair in front of a long window she is the picture of a suburbanite with station wagon in the driveway. Her pleasant environment is far removed from the inner turmoil that dominated her for such a long time.

Right after the abortion was finished, she says, “I saw and heard a large steel door close in my mind. I could not think of it, I did not deal with it for a full seven years.” When at last she began to deal with it she says she was “born again in the Lord.”

That came after she had moved with her husband and children to Atlanta. The move wasn’t a happy one. “I hated it, my husband hated it. I became extremely depressed. I was in this room one day, dusting the bookshelves, when I began to cry out to the Lord, begging Him to break the hold of this intolerable pain.”

“Lord, I realize you have forgiven me, but how do I forgive myself?” she asked. The words came back to her, “If I, God Almighty, can forgive you, who are you not to forgive yourself.” That was the start of her healing, she now says, two years later.

This healing enabled her to admit “I’ve killed my baby.” The next step for her was “Oh, God, I’ve killed my baby,” and the final admission, “Oh, God, I want my baby.” After that, she was able to face what she had done.

Days after she was able to cry out her longing for the baby she had aborted, she experienced an interior vision. The steel door was gone; in its place was a beautiful field of flowers. She had learned that “when you can express the deep grief, it begins to be healed.”

Maggie believes it can take from four to seven years for women to begin dealing with the problems that arise in the aftermath of abortion. Now, with abortion legal since 1973, studies are beginning to disclose that women are severely affected in numerous ways; psychosomatic illnesses, deep depression, alcoholism, difficulty with relationships, sexual dysfunction.

She admits in her case “doctors became the enemy” and her distrust of members of the “trusted profession” lingers. “To this day I find myself balking at going to see a doctor.”

“They,” she points out about abortion advocates, “hold it out as a right and precious opportunity.” But to her it is a “vile, evil thing... You’re not entitled to know who the doctor is who performed the abortion. The person is not being protected, the industry is being protected and it’s a multi-million dollar industry.”

It took Maggie two years from the time she realized she had forgiven herself before she was able to speak out publicly against the evils of abortion. She started slowly after much prayer and talking it over with her husband, who has “been there” for her all during her healing. Through Terry Weaver, at Birthright where she had been a volunteer, she was contacted by a lawyer for Georgia Right to Life. He asked her to appear before the judiciary committee considering the parental notification bill in the Georgia General Assembly.

Appearing before the legislators was extremely hard. “I couldn’t have done it if I didn’t think the Lord was in it,” she admits. She doesn’t know if speaking out in public will ever become easy, but she knows there is a responsibility to do this. “It’s very hard to refute experience,” she says of her value as a witness against abortion.

She faced the harsh glare of television cameras at the recent Georgia Right to Life convention. “God was real good,” she says, countering her reluctance with a reminder that she couldn’t hide but must reveal her story to others. “Just doing that, (facing the cameras) broke the last fear. I just think it needs to be a wide open thing. I believe women coming out and speaking will be a tremendous factor in turning this around.”

There are experiences and emotions she would like to share with other women who have been through abortion; the deep sense of worthlessness, the shame and guilt, the subconscious efforts to “sabotage” their own lives, as she had done.

In the healing process she would tell these troubled women that first there must be the acceptance of full responsibility and then repentance. “If you never admit what you’ve done there can be no healing.”

Another emotional wound grows with having to hide what has been done. “No one ever says, ‘Oh, yes, I’ve had one of those.’” She repeats a remark made by author and television host, Father John Powell, S.J., at a Right to Life convention- “You are as sick as your secrets”- to make the point.

She would urge priests and ministers to remember that remorse and guilt over abortion is not something they can erase in five minutes. “Don’t ever tell them ‘it’s not that bad.’ You have to have someone tell you what you did was horrible but it was not an unforgivable sin.”

Maggie belongs to a small, non-denominational church that she “found” during her healing process. Here, minister and congregation have been “fully supportive,” she says.

As a volunteer at Birthright she has talked with other women who have had abortions. Some have been cool to her counseling, regarding abortion as a convenience. Others have spoken of their pain to her and she would like to band together with these hurting women, “to share the grief, get it out in the open.” She tells them they “will make it, just don’t push it back down.” She remembers that the pain can be “unbearable to deal with” but she knows there can be forgiveness.

She wants others to find the healing she has found, a peace she came to “because He walked me through it, step by step.”