My Empty Arms

Author: Anonymous
Baby Name: Beloved
Birth Date: June 1975
Abortion Date: Jan 1975

My empty arms remind me daily of the terrible thing I did to you, all not knowing. I believed the lie that you were just a blob of tissue, but now I have seen how perfectly you were formed at just 3 months old. A courageous young doctor told me, after my third miscarriage, that the forcing open of the cervix, during an abortion, often weakens it permanently. That is what happened to me. You know all eight of your brothers and sisters my darling, and I’m glad of it, though my poor injured womb lost each of you just at 3 months, every one, Please forgive me for letting you be torn from my womb, which ached in emptiness immediately and for days, nothing like the nurses said, at all. I am so sorry I participated in your death. I felt your silent scream as you left my body, the forcing, the horrible sound of that machine and was shocked and horrified to know what I had done to you; I believed their lies, and lies they were, even about the procedure, and that you were not a person yet, when your little heart was beating all along, and your nerves were formed all along your little spine, oh the lies! You’re in Heaven now and I know you do forgive me, but oh the lifetime we missed together. Your first smile & step, your first day of school, your graduation, the kissed bruises & childhood booboos. You might be a grandpa by now with your own grands but I missed it all, I missed eight lifetimes of laughter and tears and everything in between, all because of one abortion. Perhaps you all might have had 3 children each and we’d have been a huge and loving tribe instead only me, a sad and childless old woman with no pictures to share. I drowned my guilt and pain in years of addiction, always longing to know you. I can hardly wait for Heaven to meet you all. Will you still be babies or grown or somewhere in between? I’ve asked God to please let me hold at least one of you, my babies, in my arms. Til then, Beloved.