Coerced Abortion Leads to 20 Years of Emotional Trauma
Coerced Abortion Leads to 20 Years of Emotional Trauma
New Zealand author Vikki Southwell tells her story
In her book, His Name Is Michael: Finding Hope in the Heartache of Teenage Abortion, New Zealand author Vikki Southwell wrote about having an abortion at 17 and the post-abortion trauma she wrestled with for over 20 years.
At 16, Southwell dated an 18-year-old fellow teen named Jack and began having unprotected sex with him. The young couple never discussed or considered the possibility of pregnancy. Southwell found out she was pregnant a few weeks before her 17th birthday.
Pressured Into an Abortion
Having an abortion never occurred to Southwell. She knew she would have the support of her family. Southwell says of her mother, “I was confident she would support me in raising the new life that was growing inside me.”
Southwell was right. Her parents promised to give her all the support they could and offered to help raise her baby. Neither parent mentioned abortion. Southwell writes:
I’m not even sure I knew what an abortion was at that point, and even if I did, it would have been the furthest thought from my mind…
I don’t believe it ever occurred to any of us that I would not continue with the pregnancy and give birth to this baby, and if the thought ever did occur to my parents, they never said.
But things changed drastically when Jack’s parents got involved. Jack’s mother demanded Southwell submit to an abortion. She and Jack’s father cornered Southwell and pressured her while Jack sat silently by. Southwell desperately wished that Jack would speak up and support her desire to have their baby. But Jack remained silent and let his mother control the conversation, badgering Southwell and telling her abortion was her only choice.
Abortion was the last thing Southwell wanted. She says, “The very thought of [abortion] repulsed every fibre in my being. Still, I was not strong enough or confident enough in my convictions to fight them.” She felt “coerced” into an abortion she “neither asked for nor wanted.”
The 16-year-old girl was simply no match for the tremendous amount of pressure exerted by Jack’s mother, the grandmother of her preborn child.
At the time, Southwell knew nothing about fetal development or abortion procedures. She would find out these details later, and they would only add to her grief and guilt. She was 12 weeks pregnant, with a baby who was fully formed with fingers, toes, a heartbeat, and a developing brain.
Below is a picture from the Endowment for Human Development of a baby at 10 weeks after conception, the 12th week of pregnancy.
Hurried Arrangements
Southwell thinks that if she’d known how developed her baby was and what would happen to him during the abortion procedure, she would’ve fought harder for him. She always believed the baby was a boy and, many years later, named him Michael.
Jack’s mother set about arranging the abortion. Because Southwell was rapidly approaching the legal limit, it was all arranged very quickly. As she says, “everything happened very fast.”
Southwell explains:
[P]lans were quickly put into place around me while I silently and obediently complied with everyone else’s wishes and demands.
It was though I had been sucked into a vortex with no idea how to escape.
No Counseling, No Information
On the day of the abortion, Jack and his mother picked her up and drove her to the abortion facility. Once there, she received no counseling and no information at all about the development of her baby or what the abortion would do to him.
Southwell says:
Nobody told me I would be able to see and hear everything that happened as my baby’s tiny body was violently torn apart while his life was literally sucked out of me…
Nobody told me about the guilt and shame I would carry for years, until I could finally acknowledge and grieve what I had done. Nobody told me the consequences of this decision would be long and far-reaching, plaguing me for the rest of my life.
Even now, when I look back, a gut-wrenching cry rises from the bottom of my heart: WHY DIDN’T ANYBODY TELL ME?!
She had a suction D&C abortion, where her baby was torn to pieces by a powerful suction machine. You can see a video of a former abortionist explaining this procedure below:
The Emotional Aftermath
The abortion left Southwell feeling as if “a part of me had died along with my baby that day.”
She writes about her emotional trauma:
Following the abortion, my heart was shattered. Despite what abortion advocates will tell you, it is not a simple procedure. It is horrific. It is barbaric… Yet, I was given no medical or emotional support to aid my recovery. Instead, I was sent away from the clinic with what felt like nothing more than a pat on the head and a packet of contraceptive pills.
Jack thought that things would go back to normal, and they would continue their relationship, complete with regular sex, after the abortion. He acted as though nothing had happened. But everything had changed for Southwell. She says:
Jack would never understand how traumatic this experience was for me, and I could certainly never look his mother in the eye again.
The damage was too huge to overcome, and I broke up with him not long afterwards.
A Failed Marriage and an Abusive Relationship
Southwell began a long pattern of running from her abortion. She quickly became sexually active with another man and didn’t take the birth control pills the abortion facility had given her. Only a few months after the abortion, she was pregnant again. This time, she adamantly refused to have an abortion.
She and her boyfriend were hastily married.
She was still only 17.
The marriage only lasted three years. He left her for another woman when she had a three-year-old daughter and another child under the age of one, and she became a single mother – but not for long.
About a year after the divorce, she began dating a much older man. What followed was an abusive marriage. Still wrestling with a low self-image and emotional trauma related to the abortion, Southwell says there were red flags she missed.
She says, “There were many things that, in hindsight, I should have picked up on, but in my desperate need to be loved and cared for, I completely ignored the warning signs.”
During the marriage, which lasted years, Southwell says she became “good at hiding my bruises and avoiding social engagements.”
A Return to Religious Faith
Southwell had been raised in a religious home. In fact, she’d met Jack through a youth group at a local church. Now, years later, she returned to her religious faith and joined a new church. She became more and more involved in the church and made Christian friends. Her husband resented her new faith and treated her even worse than before.
Southwell’s husband obsessively used pornography, abused her physically and verbally, and had an affair, yet she clung to the marriage. The thought of getting divorced and having two failed marriages made Southwell feel like a failure.
Was she so unlovable, she wondered, that two different husbands would reject her? Her self-esteem had been devastated by her abortion and other life events. Instead of leaving him, she stopped going to church and began to isolate herself from her Christian friends.
Eventually, however, her husband left her.
Emotional Healing
After her divorce, Southwell became more involved in her church and, finally, began to heal from the abortion. She named her aborted baby Michael and allowed herself to mourn for him.
Southwell met and married a fellow churchgoer named James, and the marriage has been a happy one. She and James eventually got involved with a different church and Southwell became the women’s pastor there.
Southwell never spoke with her father about the abortion. She did, eventually, talk to her mother about it. She found out that her mother had been suffering as well, silently, for many years, grieving her lost grandchild.
A Confrontation and a Missed Opportunity for Closure
At one point, Southwell crossed paths with Jack and his mother again. Thirty-six years after the abortion, a young couple arranged to bring their baby girl to Southwell’s church for a baby dedication. The new baby was related to Jack and his parents. She was the great-granddaughter of Jack’s mother. The child would’ve been Michael’s second cousin.
Jack and his parents would be at the ceremony, and as the women’s pastor, Southwell would be front and center. She would have to see and face them.
Southwell hoped for closure and reconciliation. Southwell says, “I naïvely envisioned a beautifully redemptive encounter filled with hugs, tears, and healing as Jack’s mother apologised to me and asked for my forgiveness.”
Before the planned ceremony, she reached out to Jack through a third party, trying to set up a meeting, but he refused to talk to her. She was never able to discuss the abortion with him.
As for Jack’s mother, when Southwell saw her at the ceremony, the woman treated her with “frosty silence and a cold, hard stare.”
Even though Southwell never made peace with the father of her aborted baby or the woman who coerced her into the abortion, she has found healing and her own way of letting go.
She says, “I lost a ton of emotional baggage that day when I fully understood it didn’t matter anymore what Jack and his family thought of me… From that day on, I was able to think of them with compassion instead of fear.”
Although it hasn’t been easy, Southwell says she’s forgiven both them and herself for the abortion. She wrote her book to help other post-abortive people find hope.
You can support Southwell and learn more about her story by buying her book here. The book also contains journal exercises and advice to help post-abortive people.
Source: Vikki Southwell His Name Is Michael: Finding Hope in the Heartache of Teenage Abortion (Wellington, New Zealand: Torn Curtain Publishing, 2023) 18, 19, 20, 23, 31-32, 35, 73
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This article originally appeared on Sarah Terzo’s Substack. You can read more of her articles here.
Sarah Terzo covered the abortion issue for over 13 years as a professional journalist. In this capacity, she wrote nearly a thousand articles about abortion and read over 875 books on the topic. She has been researching and writing about abortion since attending The College of New Jersey (class of 1997) where she minored in Women’s Studies.