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Rape Pregnancy and Later Abortion: Two Stories

A post-abortive woman and a former abortion worker tell their stories.

Sarah Terzo
7 min readSep 23, 2023
sad woman with head in hands coping with a rape pregnancy
Photo by fizkes at Canva

Read on Substack.

In a 2021 book by Janet Morana, a rape victim describes the trauma she endured after her partial-birth abortion.

The Story of a Rape Pregnancy

Christina from Alberta, Canada, was a substance abuser who was raped at seventeen. She hid her rape pregnancy for months until her mother found out. According to Christina, her mother “promptly made it clear to me that I would not be ‘keeping it.”

Because Christina was so far along, her abortion took three days to complete. The abortion facility told her nothing about the procedure.

It was a partial-birth abortion. This type of abortion became illegal in the US in 2007 after the Supreme Court case Gonzales v. Carhart upheld a ban against it. I will discuss partial-birth abortions in a minute, but for now, I want to talk about Christina’s experience.

Christina says:

During the abortion, I experienced pain like I’ve never felt before and I could feel my little baby crying out for help. She did not want to die. I began to scream and cry, but to no avail. The nurse…told me to be quiet.

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Sarah Terzo
Sarah Terzo

Written by Sarah Terzo

Sarah Terzo is a journalist who supports the Consistent Life Ethic, which opposes all violence & seeks to protect human life from conception to natural death.

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