October 7, 2024
As a Georgia woman, wife, and mother, I’m incensed by Fulton County Superior Court’s ruling last week to strike down the LIFE ACT in favor of more liberal abortion regulations in our state. It is important for everyone to understand what is at stake, and what outcome may exist as a result of this ruling.
Judge McBurney stealthily dropped his verdict, hoping it would get swallowed up by bigger news. No doubt this ruling will be appealed, and most likely overturned by the Georgia Supreme Court. But in the meantime, what about the lives that will end now that abortion procedures will be done in the second trimester– up to 22 weeks in Georgia?
This ruling is wrong for the future of Georgia, and wrong for women. Here is why.
I am an abortion survivor.
This phrase first dropped like a lead balloon on a sweltering summer day in Georgia in 2004. My mom had asked to talk with me, and she proceeded to painfully share the secret she had been keeping from me for 21 years.
My mother attempted to abort me when she learned she was pregnant. She was just like any other 18-year-old college student at the time, but she found herself faced with uncertainty and fear. She went to six abortion clinics in three different states, desperate to eliminate “the problem” of an unplanned pregnancy. She faced regulations and restrictions, and persevered, clinic after clinic.
At the last abortion clinic that my mom went to before her second trimester dilation and evacuation abortion procedure, an ultrasound determined that she was 21 weeks and 6 days pregnant. My small and fragile body was measured to be the same gestation and size as the new limit for abortions that are now legal here in Georgia.
I am grateful for these protections because I am here today. These protections actually saved my life.
I know the trauma of abortion firsthand. I watched my mother unpack and grapple with decades of guilt, shame, and regret after my premature birth. I have watched how our society has glorified the freedom of choice, and how much my mother suffered because she thought she was making the right choice, even though I survived. Abortion hurts women.
McBurney’s ruling is about so much more than a political agenda; it is about innocent lives, like mine, which will be lost. Women are being told that abortion is safe, yet there are countless women like my mom who bear the lies of the abortion industry.
In 2020, I connected with The Abortion Survivors Network (ASN), the only organization of its kind that provides hope and healing for abortion survivors around the world. ASN has reached more than 800 abortion survivors. Today, ASN also serves women who have experienced a failed abortion and whose unborn child may yet face another. It takes great courage for women and survivors to share stories that run counter to the popular narrative in our culture today. The truth needs to be heard.
But with Judge McBurney’s decision, I feel an extreme amount of lead-like heaviness like I did the day my mother told me I was an abortion survivor. Women deserve better than abortion, and so does the next generation of Georgians.
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Lauren Eden is an abortion survivor and ambassador for The Abortion Survivors Network.
