I’m writing my story to help people to value life, without exception. and to encourage others who are in bad situations to know that other people care about you and God really cares for you.
I was born in 1961 and grew up in a neighborhood in west San Jose, California, as one of two twin girls in a family of seven. I was raised in a home where there was alcoholism and incest. My parents were members of the Order of Rosicruscians and attended their meetings, but my father said he was an atheist, while our mother took us to Sunday school at a Methodist church when we were really little. Both my mother and father were violent alcoholics. They abused us children every way a child could be abused — physically, sexually and emotionally.
My father began molesting me when I was five, when my twin and I would fall asleep. I was terrified to wake up and this horrible thing was happening to me. Not knowing how to respond, I would just pretend like I was still sleeping, and I remember praying to God to make the pain stop because he was really hurting me. My whole childhood, no one ever explained to me what rape was and my sister and I never talked about it.
Compounding the circumstances was the fact that my twin sister and I were experimented on at Stanford Research Institute in their program called MK-Ultra, conducting CIA-sponsored trauma-based mind control experiments. 80 major universities and institutions were involved in these experiments during the cold war. My sister and I were locked up at Stanford for six solid months of each year for the first seven years of our lives. The purpose of the trauma and torture was to break our minds and see if they could induce disassociation and multiple personalities. Then their intent was to program each part to do things they wanted you to do, and we were sexually trafficked.
Because we were traumatized at Stanford during our formative years, we disassociated and learned to repress the abuse. They call it the thousand-yard stare, and this was our survival mechanism.
At the age of 9, my sister had a nervous breakdown and was admitted to Stanford Children’s Hospital. Every year my mother would bring her there after another nervous breakdown, and it turned out to be a safe place for her. The first time she returned from the hospital, I asked her where she had been and she said “it wasn’t so bad, it wasn’t like the torture hospital.” And that’s the only time we ever even remotely discussed our childhood abuse.
Most of the time, I was able to merely withdraw from what was happening, but at the age of 12, I remember waking up hearing my twin sister in distress and saw my father on top of her. I pulled the covers over my head, plugged my ears, held my breath and I remember my heart feeling like it was going to explode in my chest.
As a result of my father sexually abusing me, my parents believed I had become pregnant by him in 1973. I was 12 years old, and Roe v. Wade had just become law. My mother went to my childhood pediatrician to ask him for a referral to an abortion clinic, but he refused to give her a referral for moral reasons.
Years later, I went to this pediatrician to ask him about my pregnancy at 12, and he told me that his refusal to refer for an abortion caused a permanent parting of ways between my mother and him. But he gave me a copy of my medical records, which detailed all of my childhood injuries and he apologized to me for never reporting any of it. Doctors weren’t trained back then to do so. I was so sickened reading this file that I burned the whole file in disgust.
However, my mother quickly found a doctor who gave her a referral to an abortion clinic, and the appointment for my abortion was made. The only thing I was told is that I had a doctor appointment, and my mother would be taking me there for a procedure. I had no understanding that I was even pregnant at that point.
As it turned out, the abortion clinic was located a couple of blocks from our house. The day of my abortion, my mother and I drove there together in the car. Once we pulled into the parking lot, my mother instructed me to wait in the car while she went inside the clinic to see if they were ready for me. I must have panicked, because after she left, I locked myself inside the car. When my mother returned a few minutes later, I wouldn’t allow her to open the door. Every time she turned the key inside the keyhole, the button would pop up, and I would quickly push it down again. Even though I was terrified of my mother since she was very abusive, my better judgment overruled this fear because I knew she was up to no good. She didn’t lose her cool because there were other people around and she didn’t want to look like she wasn’t a nice mom.
She walked back into the abortion clinic and returned a few minutes later with two other women. The other women were trying to distract me while my mother kept trying to open the car door. I held them off for as long as I could and then my mother finally succeeded in unlocking and opening the driver’s seat door.
I was quickly escorted into the abortion clinic, down a hallway into a procedure room where I was handed a surgical gown and instructed to undress. My mother stayed with me in the room, I assume, to make sure I didn’t try to escape.
After I put on the surgical gown, I climbed up onto the table to wait for the doctor. No one ever mentioned the words abortion or pregnancy to me, and I had no idea what the procedure was to be. As I was sitting there, I noticed what appeared to be a very large square glass or plastic box sitting on the sink counter. It was completely see-through, so I could see inside of it and I just remembering wondering what it was.
A man wearing a white lab coat entered the room. I assumed he was a doctor. He instructed me to lay on my back with my legs bent at the knees and my feet were far apart. The doctor inserted something inside me, and then a machine was turned on. I remember that it sounded like a vacuum cleaner. I felt terror as I watched my blood and tissue splattering inside that large glass or plastic box.
In my 12 year old mind, seeing that this was blood and tissue coming out of me, terrified, I thought I knew what they were doing to me — that they were sucking out all of my internal organs and I was convinced they were trying to kill me. I blacked out or disassociated at that point. When I came to, the procedure was finished and my mother was pinning a Kotex pad to my underwear.
I finished dressing, and then my mother drove me home.
I don’t know how I knew this, but from that day forward I had a deep intuitive knowing that I had a baby who was taken from me. I didn’t know or understand logistical part, but I knew someone had taken my baby from me. Maybe the Holy Spirit had told me, but from then on I grieved the loss of my baby.
For the next two years after my abortion, I suffered from a black depression. My grades in school dropped. My 6th grade teacher couldn’t understand why I couldn’t remember how to do my math problems.
The first time I heard the word abortion was some time a couple of years later. I came home and asked my mother what abortion was and she told me that it’s when a woman doesn’t want to have her baby, so she has the contents of her uterus removed from her. I was shocked when she said that, because I thought, “Why on earth would anyone not want to have their baby?”
I still didn’t realize at that point that an abortion had been performed upon me. It wasn’t until years later that my suppressed memories came back and I received confirmation of these memories through my conversation with me pediatrician and when I visited that abortion clinic nearby my childhood home on Williams Rd in San Jose, California. I walked into the building and asked, “Is this an abortion clinic?”, and they confirmed these memories from 18 years earlier. I’m a person who loves the truth, even if it’s hard to hear because it was confirmation of what had been done to me.
These abortion clinic workers had no idea of how they had enabled the sexual abuse of me. I’m sure my mother lied to them and said I had a boyfriend or something like that, but because my child was aborted and the evidence of the rape was destroyed, my father was able to continue sexually abusing me and my twin sister until we turned 19 when we moved out.
From the age of three, I remember having the thought that somehow, I had died and gone to Hell, and this life I was living was actually the biblical Hell and I was being punished for something. When you think about it, my life really was Hell on earth. So by the age of 30, I began to recognize that there was a very kind and loving voice inside my heart which had spoken to me all throughout my life, and I had no way of knowing that this was our Savior. I’d been to church off and on throughout the years, but felt like I couldn’t know God. But once my healing had begun at the age of 30, I finally recognized whose voice that was, and that God had never abandoned me.
I believe that my baby who was aborted is a girl. She lives in Heaven and forgives me, understanding that I didn’t choose to abort her, but that it had been forced upon me. I believe she knows that if I’d been given the choice, I would have chosen to keep her. In 2016, I wrote her a letter, telling her that I love her and that I’m glad she’s in a place where she’s not suffering. I know that God has restored her. Even now, to talk about this, I break down crying.
Abortion is never the answer. It’s murder. When you are an expectant mother and you either choose abortion or it is forced upon you, you will never be the same. No one walks away from abortion the same as she was before. If a woman is able to walk away from an abortion and have no feelings of remorse, then her conscience is dead. I don’t know what else to call that.
I can say these things so matter-of-factly because I had two more abortions as an adult — at age 19 when I was pregnant by my fiance and he insisted I abort, and then at the age of 21 when I was diagnosed with an ectopic pregnancy. The doctor said I need to abort or I will die. I don’t even know what to believe about that, but I do know that my generation was sold a bunch of lies — that these were just a clump of cells. It never felt right to begin with, there was a lot of depression and suicidal thoughts after each abortion, and I had a complete change of heart in my 20’s. Abortion is not a mistake you can remedy, but a permanent loss of life.
If someone had explained to me at the age of 12 exactly what abortion was, I know that I would have chosen to have the baby — even though this was rape / incest. The abortion just ended up adding more trauma to a 12 year old’s life. My baby could have been the start of my healing, but instead, the abortion sent me into a deeper, darker depression. You can’t forget. How can you forget your baby?
BIO: Frida Halliday is a post-abortive mother from rape-incest, and a mother to a now 35 year old daughter and grandmother to a 2 year old grandson. She resides in the state of Washington and is now a blogger for Save The 1.
