“Did Mother ever tell you about the time she was going to abort you?” my sister asked casually.
Late in the fall of 1943, as Nazi submarines terrorized Allied shipping, a young Navy officer and his wife faced a terrible dilemma when he deployed to an aircraft carrier in the North Atlantic.
Living in makeshift wartime housing with an 8-month-old baby girl, they had only the bathtub for washing diapers and no clothes dryer or heat but a volatile kerosene heater in the New Jersey cold. At least, there had been time to enjoy each other on a recent Thanksgiving furlough. But now, that joy was overcome by fear when they discovered another child was on the way.
The young woman’s parents—already anxious for their daughter and only child—were furious at her husband for this, refused to speak to him, and threatened to disown her. Torn and confused, at her next visit with the Navy doctor the 21-year-old wife poured out her anguish and tears.
The doctor, however, had a solution to her problem. Handing her a small, dark red vial and scheduling her for an appointment the following week, he explained that he could “fix everything” quickly and easily after she took the pills.
Days later, before the appointment, the young woman shook the pills out of the vial into her hand and closed her fist. Shaking from both cold and anxiety, she poured a glass of water with her other hand. Uneasily, she hesitated and looked out a frost-covered kitchen window. “What if this is the son my husband wants?” she thought. Turning to her fist, she paused, then opened it and lifted the glass of water.
“Did Mother ever tell you about the time she was going to abort you?” my 17-month-older sister asked casually as we chatted one day 35 years later.
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Lying on the floor, I curled up in a fetal position and imagined the kitchen scene 35 years earlier as my sister had related it: myself tightly bound inside my mother’s womb, her holding the pills and glass of water, pausing over her decision.
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Stunned, I stared at her and shook my head in silent disbelief. My mother did mention it briefly later in a letter, but in that moment I stood transfixed as my sister told me the story—which ended with startling simplicity:
“At the last minute, she just threw the pills away into the trash can.”
This jarring revelation stirred a host of unsettling, lifelong mysteries.
I remembered my recurrent nightmare of swimming frantically underwater and, strangely, breathing while submerged—an amniotic, prenatal “memory”? Once, I told a psychiatrist how I felt “trapped” and panicky in close relationships with women. Fears of death had dogged me, and a pervasive, empty sense of not belonging anywhere.
“You were a colicky baby and cried awfully, night after night,” my mother had told me years before.
“Gordon’s always afraid he’s going to miss something,” Dad often teased me as a boy.
At the time, I was pastoring my first church out of Harvard Divinity School and, during my ministry, had been upended by a supernatural/charismatic experience. Soon after talking with my sister, I began struggling with headaches and anxiety and at last, decided to pray graphically into my fearful “memory.”
Lying on the floor, I curled up in a fetal position and imagined the kitchen scene 35 years earlier as my sister had related it: myself tightly bound inside my mother’s womb, her holding the pills and glass of water, pausing over her decision.
As I “saw” my mother lift the pills, I began to shake in terror. “Jesus, help!” I cried out suddenly, desperately. “Save me, Jesus!” As I lay trapped and trembling, in my mind’s eye I saw a figure come into the kitchen and stand by my mother. With a single gesture, he reached and swept the pills out of her hand and into the trash can.
Amazed, I watched as he then turned to me. “You don’t owe your life to your mother,” he declared. “It was I who stayed her hand. You belong to me.”
A cool sensation of release swept over me. Sighing deeply, I lay quiet.
Later, I remembered Jesus’ promise to his followers, “You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free” (John 8:32NIV).
Indeed, this watershed experience freed me to face many unhealthy dynamics in my life—most notably, feeling overly responsible for my mother’s happiness and guilty for wanting a life of my own. In the years since, I’ve gone back into that scene several more times to cry out my feelings toward both my mother and father—until I could forgive them in their predicament, sense their genuine love for me, and become current with my heart.
The proverbial “survivor’s question” yet stirs: Why me? Why was I saved when millions of other children who shared my plight have died? Why did God not stay the hand of their mothers? Certainly, not because of any righteousness on my part in an embryonic state—nor even, as the vision revealed, on my mother’s part, thankful as I am that she “just threw the pills away.”
In my dismay and unknowing, I find direction in Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel’s statement, “The role of the survivor is to testify.” (A Jew Today, New York: Vintage Books, 1979, p.18.) To tell the story of God’s deliverance saves you from both the presumption of deserving and the shame of undeserving.
In fact, honest testimony trumps both politically correct tolerance and religiously correct judgment. Better, it can jar others out of complacency or despair to entertain saving power far beyond their own.
Today, 68 years later, I remain humbled by this unwieldy yet compelling mystery—and determined to entertain it. I’m neither obligated to believe nor ashamed to be alive.
I’m privileged to testify. The more I do, the more thankful I am to God, and the more determined I am to see others experience that saving power themselves.
Is that enough to earn the deliverance I didn’t deserve? I don’t know. I only know it’s all I can do, and I do it gratefully.
Read more on Abortion.
Photo courtesy of midiman/Flickr
About Gordon Dalbey
This is a powerful article. Regarding the author’s question about why he was miraculously saved from abortion when countless others are not — my tho’t is that it may be because the saving would result in this article. The salvation and subsequent article may have been part of an epic plan. Anyway, thanks for publishing this article.
Gordon – compelling story, thanks for sharing. My gut reaction is to scrutinize your account, but on second reflection I think I’d rather just enjoy the beauty of your story, of your personal triumphs, and of your mother (and God’s) deep love for you.
Thanks.
Reading this rticle as well as your bio, it’s obvious why you were saved from death. May God continue to bless us with your survival.
Gordon- I was, evidently, my Mother’s 4th pregnancy.
Your essay hit me between the eyes.
http://standup2p.wordpress.com/2012/07/07/mother-would-have-been-79/
I don’t know why I came to term & think her weight and overall health had more to do with what might have been my older siblings not making it.
I can’t imagine that there was something more important about my soul in any plan…
Sort of wish I could ID some big picture reason that I’m here.
Your descriptions of your mother ring false: you weren’t there, she didn’t tell you about her feelings or actions, you have no idea what she was thinking or feeling. She may have told your sister a story many years later (and who can say if she was being truthful or embellished her tale?) but your sister wasn’t a witness to this event either, as she was eight months old. Neither infants nor fetuses have the brain organization required to establish long-term memories.
Your description of the abortifacient pills ring false: there were no such pills that a doctor would have given her in 1943. (I don’t doubt that a Navy doctor might have taken pity on a young woman and risked his job by breaking the law to arrange a surgical abortion for her, but he wouldn’t have given her poisonous pills to induce an abortion. Perhaps those pills were simply a safe, legal medicine to be taken the day of a surgical abortion to control bleeding or reduce her pain.)
You did not survive an abortion procedure; you were not delivered from abortion. Your mother simply decided to continue with her pregnancy. You could just as easily, and certainly more honestly, say that you’re among the 6+ billion or so of us who weren’t miscarried and survived our gestation.
Everything you describe here you saw “in your mind’s eye” thirty-five years after the supposed event. Basically, you simply imagined all of this. It’s your choice to delude yourself into thinking that your cries to Jesus in 1978 retroactively took pills that wouldn’t have induced an abortion out of the hands of your mother, but there is no mystery here for any thinking person who takes the time to read your story and sees the appalling fiction that is obvious from the fourth paragraph onward.
Booooom! Right on!
Wow what a load of rubbish, and how offence to compare ‘surviving’ the possibility of being aborted by a woman who was full of love for her existing child and fear of the future to surviving and witnessing (in reality, not in a fantasy) the systematic murder of millions in the holocaust. It really surprises me that this website which is full of good thoughtful pieces should host such a ridiculous article. Come on Good Men Project be serious. This sort of nonsense has no place on your website.
I’m sorry to hear this has been such an issue for you, but it’s important to remember that when your mother considered having that abortion whether or not you were actually alive in the same sense you are now is a matter for debate.
Terminating a pregnancy is pretty different to gassing hundreds of fully aware human beings who’s ability to suffer and feel pain is beyond any doubt.
Aaron: It’s a confusing story, isn’t it? What he’s actually saying is not that the fetus-that-was-him cried out to God, but rather that, as an adult, in 1978, he lay on his his floor and imagined being in the womb and crying out to Jesus: “Lying on the floor, I curled up in a fetal position and imagined the kitchen scene 35 years earlier…As I “saw” my mother lift the pills, I began to shake in terror. “Jesus, help!” I cried out suddenly, desperately. “Save me, Jesus!”…in my mind’s eye I saw a figure come into the kitchen and stand by my mother. With a single gesture, he reached and swept the pills out of her hand and into the trash can.” This all happened only in his mind’s eye.
I agree with you that “recovered memories” are to be treated as suspect, but he’s not actually talking about a recovered memory, but rather telling us the story of his adult reverie. He imagined himself in the womb, and he imagined his fetal self in danger of being destroyed, and now he imagines himself as a survivor. It would be hilarious if it weren’t so offensive to people who’ve actually survived actual experiences that threatened their lives.
Just a note: the comment above was written in response to a comment by “Aaron”, but I’m seeing now that his comment was removed.
Comparing yourself to a Holocaust survivor is despicable. And to think a mythical deity you hallucinated is proof of anything is downright laughable. This is anti-choice sentiment wrapped in a pretty package. Nothing more.
What an insulting, offensive article. How dare you appropriate the words of Holocaust survivors as though you’ve been through what they have! You didn’t ‘survive’ anything. If you’re an ‘abortion survivor’, then so are the other 7 billion people on the planet, because any one of us could have been aborted before being born. But we weren’t, and guess what, most of us have no issues with that. The problems you describe in your life are not because you could have been aborted.
MOD EDIT: Personal attack removed. Please critique ideas, not people.
This story seems to me to illustrate not the harm caused by abortion but the psychological harm caused by religion.
.MOD EDIT: Please avoid generalisations such as this. While it’s true that some religions heavily oppose abortion, not all do.
“my tho’t is that it may be because the saving would result in this article. The salvation and subsequent article may have been part of an epic plan.”
I sure hope God has a better plan for us than people writing questionable articles for crappy websites.
What pills? There were no pills for abortion then. She probably decided she didn’t want to see an ILLEGAL butchering doctor you fool where she might have lost her LIFE, which is what people like YOU want. Back to the coathangers! Back to women losing their lives!
See the statistics of women losing their lives due to abortion being illegal. 68,000 women die a year due to unsafe/coathanger/ illegal abortions. Thanks to idiots like the OP, he wants the USA to go back to that kind of thing.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unsafe_abortion
You people are just plain crazy, this man is mad dog crazy.
My childhood consisted of both physical and sexual and mental abuse. I was beaten nightly and always told that I will never amont to anything because I am usless and worth nothing. When I had a babysitter I was touched in areas that I care not disscuss on this thread. This poor existance of what was known as my childhood only to lead to a poor adulthoold. I would of been better off if I was aborted. I still wish that I was not part of this world.
Abortive pills were not invented until 1980. This story cannot be true.
To be more precise the compound for this drug wasn’t discovered until 1949 and it didn’t become a drug until 1980 nor had started being used for abortions until 1981, and yet the pregnancy would have happened in 1943/1944. But you know, when “Divine Intervention” comes up, the story becomes a bit juicer, so that’s what makes this story so great.
I think I just threw up a little.