What if all the shouting about abortion means that hurting women are not being heard?

NZ Focus on the Family 29 September 2015
Hi, my name is Marina and I am the founder of the Buttons Project, a special ministry which helps women towards healing after abortion.

October is significant month for me, it is a time to reflect, to remember, to grieve and love.

Why?

Because of certain experiences in my own life/family, and one significant choice in particular that I made in October 1986.

I had an abortion.

Abortion is different for everyone, and everyone’s story is different. For me, abortion wasn’t the so called quick fix we thought it was.

If I knew back then what I would go through, I would have chosen life for my baby, and a future free from the consequences of health and relationship problems that resulted from my abortion.

It has been a long road of healing, and through my experience the Buttons Project was birthed to help others share their story, and give a button to commemorate the baby they never got to meet – and to declare the truth that what happened mattered, and that a way to remember, to grieve and to love is necessary.

Religious beliefs are often blamed for women feeling stigmatised, shamed and judged after their abortion. However, it is often only through faith that women find healing, forgiveness and unconditional love.

Through the Buttons Project I have received many stories from woman, often decades after the event, going through regret and grief emotions.

Sometimes in life you wish you had your ‘older self’’ able to speak into your thought process – to give you that perspective that’s missing at the time of decision making, because there is no turning the clock back on past events.

Something done to solve one issue can have unimagined consequences; for ourselves, and many others – let alone the baby.

Whatever your beliefs are, we need to walk gently in people’s lives, as we do not know the journey someone has travelled, or the choices that a woman was facing that led her to having an abortion.
READ MORE: http://www.family.org.nz/our-blog/marina-2