The 2025 National Day of Remembrance for Aborted Children was held September 13, which was the 13th annual event which has grown to 230 locations nationwide. It is a joint project of Citizens for a Pro-Life Society, and the Pro-Life Action League.
The Sunbury, Ohio, location featured the testimony of Cindy, a woman who has mourned the loss of two children through abortion.
Cindy has spent decades working in the pro-life movement, specifically ministering to women who have suffered from post-abortion issues to find grace and healing.
She noted the trend of increasingly darker tactics by abortion proponents as chemical abortion dominates the industry amid widespread ambivalence in the culture toward the killing of approximately 66 million unborn babies over the past five decades.
“What hasn’t changed is the grief, shame, regret, and isolation abortion brings into our lives,” she said.
Kim Hayes
[Click here to subscribe to Pregnancy Help News!]
Cindy’s family attended church every week while she was growing up. However, she noted they were “Sunday Christians” who never opened the Bible or talked about God and what He meant to them.
“We talked of course, but not about anything very important,” Cindy recalled. “Politics, religion, emotions or sex were taboo subjects.”
She loved her family, she said, but she needed more than that, more guidance.
Cindy was impacted especially by the women’s liberation movement and found the world a confusing place.
“When my high school boyfriend and I entered our second year at Ohio State, I became pregnant at 19,” she said. “My church-going mother had suspected and said, ‘If you’re pregnant, you’re having an abortion.’”
Cindy recalled being shocked by her mother’s words.
“Had her response been different, my choice would have been different,” she said. “Regardless, I never admitted to her I was pregnant and as far as I know, she never found out. Our relationship was never quite the same.”
With her boyfriend and the encouragement of friends, Cindy chose abortion. Those who advised her were in unison declaring abortion to be an easy solution to the problem.
“I learned later on that you can make all the choices you want to, but you can’t choose the consequences of those choices,” she said. {Especially the negative ones.”
Her relationship later ended, and Cindy continued a “long destructive path.”
In her twenties Cindy had a couple long term relationships and then a second abortion.
“Because once you’ve made that decision, it’s easier to make it the second time,” she said.
“My procedures were surgical and everything you’ve heard about the process being cold and impersonal is true,” she added.
“I was just a number that day to help them reach their quota,” said Cindy.
From that time on, having finished college and getting a good job, Cindy simply would not allow herself to admit how her abortion decisions were affecting her.
With what she called a “happy-go-lucky mask” in public, Cindy carried guilt and shame and had growing depression.
It would be years before Cindy could reflect on this time and acknowledge what had happened to her. Only through abortion healing programs would she be able to connect the burden deep in her heart to her conscious thoughts.
She lived in what she called a “gray existence” for a long time.
As Cindy continued in this “gray zone” she had a reunion with an old boyfriend. This led to a third pregnancy.
“This time I chose life,” she said. “I had my son and thought right away, however strange it may sound, that I was determined to raise him in a Christian home.”
This took her back to church. Unfortunately, the church failed this young mom. When she inquired about getting her baby baptized, she met with a lack of compassion.
For the next four years, Cindy did not go to church. The only Biblical influence during that time was what had been planted in her heart from attending Sunday School as a child. She recalled that Jesus loved her.
“I believed it, but I just wasn’t sure how to get back to God at that time,” she said.
Friends invited her to a church which was a different church experience for her. The music and sermons resonated with her, and she learned that God wasn’t just for Sundays.
Not only was she welcomed as a single mother, but she also loved having found a church home for her son. Cindy learned she wasn’t alone in her feelings of deep hurt.
“The women and men who attend church but who don’t believe the gospel applies to them, because of their pasts, including abortion,” are the walking wounded, she said.
Within a few months, on Mother’s Day, the pastor acknowledged the mothers and as she recalled he also spoke with empathy and concern for those who had experienced abortion.
“I managed to hear the words, ‘sin, repentance, and restoration,’” Cindy noted. “But I was far too mortified to go forward for prayer. I had buried my abortions, and they were going to stay that way.”
She would remain trapped in silence for some time as the enemy of her soul whispered in her ear that what she had done was so horrible that forgiveness was out of reach.
“Thankfully, God’s grace was stronger,” Cindy said.
The Spirit of the Lord was relentless in pursuing her. The message of truth and God’s grace would reach her ears repeatedly; at church, on TV, the radio, and many people talking about abortion.
Cindy started reading books, one of which was a biography of Keith Green, a Christian artist who had been killed in an airplane accident which also claimed the lives of his two youngest children.
Cindy was undone by this story. She thought about the two children she had aborted. The story had humanized her two babies, and then she heard that same Mother’s Day sermon for the third time.
The message received, Cindy humbled herself, asked the Lord to forgive her and she went to a group at church where she learned to begin walking the path of restoration. The magnitude of what Jesus had accomplished on the cross for her drew her into receive His forgiveness.
No longer would she continue as an outsider in the church.
“I was a beloved daughter of the King,” she said.
Biblical teaching led her to not only forgive herself, but all those who had hurt and abandoned her, the men in those relationships, her mother and the pastor at the earlier church who had spoken words of condemnation to her.
Healing enabled Cindy to lead a single mom’s group and begin a new career path in the pro-life movement. That new job enabled her to experience even deeper levels of healing as she trained and participated in post-abortion groups as part of her work.
Now she has the privilege of witnessing the healing process at work in other women as they discover that the God of the universe sees them, loves them, and forgives them.
Tweet This: Biblical teaching led one post-abortive mom to not only forgive herself, but all those who had hurt and abandoned her.
The director of client services from the pregnancy help center Cindy works with stated this about her:
“God works through Cindy to bring healing and hope to the brokenhearted. Her compassion and wisdom gently lead those wounded by abortion to the truth, grace, and restoration found in Christ.”
Cindy closed her testimony for the Sunbury, Ohio, National Day of Remembrance for Aborted Children saying, “Finally, I am able and thankful to be here today to memorialize our children.”
