.Let’s face it

Should all secrets be kept secret?
By definition, if anything is a secret, it is supposed to be kept hidden from common knowledge. Secrets consist of information which, if exposed to people who should not know, would cause even family trees to fall to pieces.
Secrets are people, places, events, developments, changes, jobs, crimes, sins and even illnesses.
Can people be
secrets?
If they were aborted as zygotes or embryos a short or long time ago, they live only in memory in the mind of the mothers and fathers who refused to become parents.
If they are extra-marital lovers, they cannot be readily announced.
If they are casualties of hit-and-run road traffic accidents where some motorists have sped away, certain that the pedestrians must have died from the impact in an incident (supposedly) seen by no-one, such motorists will not want to disclose the killing.
If they are children that the bride, who is their mother, does not want the bridegroom to know about, they will be kept a long distance away.
One Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) opined that, “Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead.”
He was reasoning around the difficulty of keeping a secret secret.
But one of the difficulties we need contemplate here, at the beginning of a New Year, is the kind of secret that kills the keeper—much like the message that gets the messenger killed.
Mothers and fathers who have aborted a child born out of wedlock suffer from lifelong trauma because of that kind of secret.
Research shows that it is generally believed that mothers who have aborted are haunted by the memory of the life lost.
Many are such women who may even have begun to think of a name for their boy or girl—before the fathers insisted on elimination.
Research has shown that fathers too do not escape from the weight and suffocation of that loss.
Mothers have held to a plaything that somehow provides some connection with the deceased child, finding no means of expressing their grief, remorse and regret for committing murder.
Fathers have buried themselves in studies, business, politics, and possibly in marriage to other women with whom they have raised happy families.
But if your offspring dies, no matter under what conditions, you can never reach a place of complete forgetfulness.
That is where guilt does not fade; the memory of that decision to cut off a successor and an entire generation lives on.
THERAPY
Partly for cultural and sociological reasons, our society does not offer any kind of therapy for those mothers and fathers who long to come to terms with their misdeeds.
In the Western hemisphere, where counselling for different kinds of human need is an industry with many therapeutic professions, the public is more open to dealing with such situations.
Support groups for women have been initiated by mothers who, once or even twice aborted, who have found healing and release after they met Jesus Christ.
Some of those support groups have spurred the emergence of support groups for fathers who once forced their lovers to abort.
The point is that abortion – being what it is – becomes a secret; but one that slowly eats away the inner person with the internal organs and eventually kills.
Some women have spoken of mourning for as long as 35 years.
If you consider it, an abortion is a termination of human life; and a sacrifice to enable mother and father move on in life.
It requires a funeral, but there shall be none because in a large hospital, the remains of the foetus will be incinerated.
In a township or village setting the remains will be thrown into a pit latrine or buried somewhere.
A funeral requires recall, where we remember the deceased and express our solidarity with the bereaved couple or family—but the couple in this context cannot even console one another.
Of course a miscarried foetus would, in most Zambian traditions, be disposed of by only a few elderly women and no funeral as such will be held—but it affords the grieving parents closure.
The absence of such closure for parents of the departed aborted ones complicates matters to no small degree.
Writing under the Project Rachel Ministry website, Paula Vandegaer, who is a licensed clinical social worker, executive director of International Life Services and editor of Living World magazine, makes some pertinent observations of what mothers compelled to abort suffer.
“But if society denies the mother’s loss, her body does not. God prepares a woman psychologically and physically for motherhood. When a woman is pregnant she feels different,” she says.
Within a few days after conception, even before the tiny embryo has nested in her uterine wall, a hormone called ‘early pregnancy factor’ is found in her bloodstream, alerting the cells of her body to the pregnancy.
Her body may now crave different foods, she may need more rest.
New cells begin to grow in her breasts, cells which will mature and secrete milk specially formulated for the needs of a newborn.
She begins to think ‘baby.’
She starts noticing babies on the street, in the store, on television.
“She may dream about her baby at night, and fantasize about her baby during the day. What name? Who will he or she look like?”
STOP
Vandegaer then observes: “But if she wants to have an abortion she must try to stop this process. She must deny the maternal feelings entering into her consciousness. She must believe that what is inside of her is not fully a baby. She must stop the process of thinking about her baby as ‘her baby’.”
But although her mind may say one thing, her emotional life and her body cells say another.
If she has the abortion, the very cells of her body remember the pregnancy and know that the process of change that had been going on was stopped in an unnatural manner.
“Her body and her emotions tell her that she is a mother who has lost a child. And so it is not surprising that after the abortion, a pain begins to emerge from the depths of her heart. She has a loss to mourn, but cannot allow herself to grieve.
“Grieving would require admitting to herself that a child was killed in the abortion and that she shares responsibility for her child’s death.” But that is too heavy to bear, so she must convince herself that the baby was not a human being after all.
Vandegaer posits that abortion is an extremely unnatural experience for a woman’s body and her maternal instinct.
“Negative reactions are to be expected and do not depend on a person’s religious beliefs or general mental health.”
She refers to a study done by Anne Speckhard, PhD, who found that 85 per cent of the women reported that they were surprised at the intensity of their emotional reaction to the abortion.
“These reactions included discomfort with children, feelings of low self-worth, guilt, feelings of anger, depression, grief, increased alcohol use, crying, inability to communicate and feeling suicidal. Yet 72 per cent of the subjects reported no identifiable religious belief at the time of the abortion.”
Post-abortion reactions are specific and identifiable.
They originate mainly from the problem of denial and suppression of feelings.
“When we suppress one of our emotions it affects all of them. This is the basis of post-abortion trauma: the denial of the baby and the denial of our feelings. This causes symptoms of re-experience, avoidance and impacted grieving.”
In re-experience, the abortion trauma can be re-lived in a number of ways.
Some women experience recollections and flashbacks of the abortion and dreams of the unborn child.
Some experience intense psychological distress from people or things that remind them of the abortion, such as seeing pregnant women or passing an abortion clinic.
“Intense grieving and depression may occur on the anniversary dates of the abortion or the child’s projected due date,” and some women have been seen to visit the abortion centre on the anniversary date of the abortion.
Rather than die a slow, agonizing death over many years, mothers and fathers who have aborted before need to come to terms with their need for inner healing.
There is a way to be forgiven, relieved and released from the abortion and its lasting impact; there is a Saviour and that is Jesus Christ.
If you are such a parent, and you see the need to be set free from all that the abortion has brought upon your life, seek genuine help and allow the Holy Spirit of God to intervene. It is guaranteed in Scripture that He will come and save you.
Email: timelegacy2017@gmail.com.