An Open Letter to My Aborted Daughter, Nicole

I watched the movie, Gosnell, last night because I felt I owed you that. To know precisely what was done to you all those years ago, while I slept, unconscious. I thought I would sob through the entire film; instead, I was dry-eyed throughout. I could think of little else all evening as I thought about the woman I had been and what I did to you.

Upon awakening early this morning, I wrestled with a tangle of emotions and questions, primarily these two:

“What had I accomplished by watching this?”

“What was different now that I knew exactly what happens when we decide to kill our babies?”

And it came to me. Just watching it was not enough... I needed to write a second letter to you, this one to be shared publicly. [Your naming and writing of the first is a very long story.]

When I flew to New York on that Friday night, so many years ago, I knew I was committing murder. That you were a ‘fetus’ and therefore not a person was not among the many of the lies I told myself. In fact, each of us who has ever been pregnant knows that the being she carries within her is...a life. The 30 million of us who have aborted our babies in this country need no law or physician to tell us that the strange sensations we feel in our bodies are from the presence of a new life... But we do it anyway.

The irony of Gosnell: America’s Biggest Serial Killer’s public release on the very day that New York passed a series of laws elevating abortion to a ‘fundamental human right’ was not lost on anyone who has given any thought to this epidemic of death.

I wish I could persuade myself that had I known precisely what would take place, chillingly explained by the elegant, attractive law− abiding Abortionist in the movie who “willingly testifies that she has performed over 30,000 abortions, many of them second-trimester procedures...how potassium chloride is injected into the heart of 23-week-old fetuses as [the defense attorney] presents the hideously long eight-inch needle. [She] explains that this injection causes fetal demise ensuring babies will not be born alive as was the case in Gosnell’s abortion methods. [Because of the defense attorney’s questions],  she is forced to describe the procedure in which the abortionist, guided by sonogram, grabs with forceps an arm or a leg and tears the baby apart, its limbs extracted from the womb. In larger babies the “grey matter” would be suctioned out of the skull and the skull collapsed. No one is spared the grisly details in a dialogue specifically designed to show no difference exists between legal abortion procedures and what Gosnell did in his clinic and for which he stands accused.”

That I would not have gone through with killing you. But I cannot say it, not with certainty, I can only hope that I would have flown back home to face the music, with you still safely inside me.

I guess the reason I feel compelled to write these words to you is to shock others who are wondering what to do. Get the attention of women who feel that killing their infants is their only way out.

Perhaps they made a ridiculous promise just like I did.

Or believe the inane lies we tell ourselves about ourselves, about men and about sex.

• There is no difference between men and women aside from the obvious anatomical ones.

I believed and repeatedly proclaimed that lie, the one I hear from so many young women as they justify their promiscuous behavior just as I once did. We work so hard to suppress our repugnance to our one night stands. To deny the reality that our emotions and desires about sexual intercourse are wholly different from those of men.

• We have no need for men.

Helen Reddy’s and Katy Perry’s songs promote the lie that acting like men and assuming their aggressive behaviors will make us powerful, make us feel fulfilled. They are fun to sing and the more we repeat them, the more we believe it. When what our hearts and psyches desire most is to surrender to our mates. The deepest yearning of our souls for the love of a good man we suppress. Repeating the lies so often that we begin to believe that we are happy despite all evidence to the contrary.

• We believe that changing the name changes the nature of a thing.

If we call it a fetus, it is not a baby. Placing the whole thorny abortion mess under the rubric of ‘women’s reproductive rights,’ ‘the right to choose,’ conveniently shades it under the umbrella of politics. Where our politicians- and their constituents- can safely distinguish between their own personal opinions politics. It becomes a mantra. “Personally, I don’t believe in abortion, but I cannot deprive others of their right to choose.”

In this movie, Gosnell, we are given a wake-up call about the barbaric brutality lurking behind the slogans and the politics. Just like the jurors who sentenced the physician abortionist to a life sentence for murder.

It was the testimony of one of Gosnell’s young employees that galvanizes the case for the prosecution in one fell swoop. Because of a picture.

The young woman had taken a photograph of “Baby A,” an infant boy who was clearly close to full term development and was breathing after delivery. And whose spinal cord had been severed by Gosnell after birth. The twelve jurors can barely look at the photo as the DA slowly passes by each and every face.

And listen to the DA as she states calmly, deliberately, “This is not a case about abortion. This case is about murder.”