Nicole W. CooleyPro-Life Activist, Speaker and Author ofInto the Light: Rape, Abortion and the Truth that Set Me Free

One in three women will experience sexual abuse during her lifetime.  Forty-three percent of women will have an abortion during their child bearing years.  The vast majority of women never report rape to the authorities.  Few rape cases are ever prosecuted.  Fewer still win.  Only a very small percentage of rapists ever go to jail, and even then for only one to three years.  Most women suffer in silence and never tell anyone what happened to them. 

I am free!  Anyone who has a history sexual abuse can tell you that the experience tends to revisit you throughout your life – when you get married, when you have children, and so on.  With Abby’s recent birth, I didn’t experience any post-traumatic stress issues at all – which is a first for me.  My marriage is also healthy, non-encumbered by my past.

Post abortion syndrome is much like the Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) experienced by soldiers returning from war.  The mind gets stuck and relives the past in the present.  Many post-abortive women are plagued by PTSD symptoms including nightmares, anxiety, depression, substance abuse and suicidal tendencies. 

Hope is the beginning of healing.  God is the giver of hope.  It is my prayer that He will use my book as a means to provide hope.  Hope provides the seeds for faith.  Once you can conceive hope – you begin to grow faith through the process of realization of hope.  Over the past ten years, the seeds of hope planted in my heart have grown into a deep and abiding faith in God.  My pain has become my platform and my ministry.  My heart cries for the broken women who will read my book.  As they relate to me and cry with me, I trust they will at last find the courage to allow God to work healing in them as well.

For years after my rape and abortion, I felt like I lived in a closed space densely filled with dust.  Everything in my life felt muted and hazy.  At the end of a stormy tunnel, I struggled to hear God’s voice in my heart and could only do so with great straining and struggle-filled prayers.  The oppression of my pain weighed me down physically, emotionally and spiritually.  I could barely breathe.  I felt broken, worthless, and depressed.  Yet, through the fog, I could sense a faint ray of light and hope.  Jesus loved me and extended His hand to me.  Sometimes I took it.  Sometimes I stubbornly refused His help and wallowed in my misery for awhile longer.  Slowly, and often only out of sheer obedience to God by the strength of my love for Him, I began the climb out of my life’s darkest pit.  It is from the top of my rock that I am able to speak now.  God is good.  My victory is very sweet.

Satan has dominion over the darkness, but God is sovereign over both the dark and light places in our lives, if we allow Him to be.  In Psalms we learn that darkness and light are alike to God – He is not intimidated by the darkness as we are.  Time and again as I walked out of my darkness, I found God compelling me to bring yet another issue to the surface – to the light.  Sometimes He would compel me to tell someone else – other times it was just something I needed to face.  I am convinced we can’t heal in the dark.  As long as we have a secret, we have also given Satan a foothold to hold us back.  Once the hurt is exposed, it loses its power over us.  God takes what was meant to destroy and uses it to make us stronger.

Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing therapy is a process where the therapist moves his hand or an object from side to side while the client is instructed to watch the movement while mentally focusing on a traumatic scene.  The theory is that at the point of trauma, the brain gets stuck and stops deeper REM processing which enables us to sort out the things that happen to us.  This technique helps to open that channel again and pull information from both sides of the brain together again.  During therapy, I also noticed that in addition to being able to remember details I hadn’t previously, I also would recall pertinent scripture during the process.  The lies I had believed about the trauma were then exposed and replaced by God’s truth, effectively healing these memories forever.

No, I don’t.  Even in cases of rape, the reality that abortion kills an innocent baby is the same.  What makes abortion wrong in all the other cases still applies.  In saving the life of the mother, the intent of the surgery is not to take a life, but to save the life you can.  (In some cases it may be the baby instead of the mother who can be saved.)  I don't consider such emergency surgery which may also result in the baby dying as abortive.  At one of the Silent No More rallies I attended in Colorado, a woman shared how she had an abortion because the doctors told her it was necessary to save her life.  To this day she regrets the decision –and I can still feel the sadness in her voice.  At the time of my abortion I believed that I didn’t have another choice.  It is devastating to believe you have to choose between your life and the life of your child – and then live with the aftermath of that decision.  Women are naturally wired to protect their offspring; abortion is counter to that instinct.  It is self-destructive and completely unnecessary. 

If you think you can’t bear nine months of pregnancy, I can tell you from experience that the years of regret have been worse.  I want women facing this decision to know you can carry to term; you can choose the adoptive parents and set your own terms, if you wish.  You can live without the tears, the regret and the nights of despair – or worse.

I heard a great quote about forgiveness on TV one night, I can’t remember the source.  “Unforgiveness is like drinking poison and waiting for the other person to die.”  Yes, I have forgiven everyone who hurt me – the man who raped me, the abortionist, my pastor for her bad advice, everyone.  For me it was about obedience to God – He had forgiven me and commanded me to forgive as well.  But, God didn’t ask me to do so for their benefit – but for my own because He knows that unforgiveness hurts the one who holds onto it, not the other guy.  It also helped me to know that forgiveness didn’t mean the other person was off the hook for what they did – they were still accountable to God.  Forgiveness was really between God and me.  The other benefit of forgiveness is that it has the fruit of compassion and objectivity.

I was confused.  In the beginning – before I had forgiven the man who raped me – I had a lot of anger towards him and his baby.  I was afraid that as long as I carried his child I would never be free of him.  I had a lot of irrational fears at that time – another was that I wasn’t safe as long as I was pregnant.  I had an abortion about 3 weeks after I discovered I was pregnant.  I didn’t give myself enough time to truly deal with the gravity of the decision before me.  Unfortunately, those closest to me were also swayed by the prevailing public opinion at the time that abortion was justifiable in cases of rape.

I believe I would have had a son named Matthew – with dark hair and green eyes.  He would be 18 years old today.  My husband told me had he been given the opportunity, he would have married me anyway and adopted him.  I have lost loved ones over the years – but the pain pales in comparison to the heartbreak of killing your own child.  I can’t tell you how many nights I would wake up and cry gut-wrenching sobs.  I don’t do that anymore, but the sadness in my heart will never completely go away.  There is no one who benefits from an abortion – the baby dies a horrific death, the mother lives with this as do the people who allowed the abortion to happen.  It takes a woman an average of 8 to 10 years to overcome denial and begin to face this trauma.  For others involved it may take much longer.  But eventually everyone has to face it – sometimes involuntarily during the waning years of old age.  I hope my book will encourage those hurting from an abortion to find the courage to face the truth – and be healed through the grace of Jesus.