Dear Soul Arcanum:
Last year I had an abortion when I was about eight weeks pregnant. (I felt very drawn to the father, but we were only together for a short time.) Now I feel like I sent the most miraculous thing out of my life. I have had moments of despondency and depression over this. I still seem to have some kind of emotional disconnect about the whole thing, as if I was never really pregnant at all. I’m not against abortion totally, but I can’t help feeling I made the Biggest Mistake of my Life. I’m so disappointed in myself. This would have been my first child. Does this fact alone give me horrible karma for my future? I feel like God gave me a great responsibility and a wonderful chance by allowing this to happen, but I totally dropped the ball. How do I begin to deal with this?
– Elena
Dear Elena:
Instinctively we all know that life is a sacred gift, and that perhaps the worst thing we can do is take another’s life. I want to assure you, however, that from the perspective of Spirit, your decision is not unforgivable. As I see it, there are two key issues that are often overlooked or misunderstood when it comes to the subject of abortion, and exploring them will hopefully lead you to peace and healing.
The first issue is the obvious fact that it is reprehensible to bring a child into this world when you know you are unwilling or unable to care for that child in a responsible, loving way, or to ensure that someone else does. I once dated a man whose job was to investigate child abuse cases and remove children from abusive or neglectful homes. Though I truly believe that each one of us incarnates with certain spiritual lessons to learn, it still broke my heart to be so frequently reminded that there are many vulnerable little people in the world who are suffering from the resentment or neglect of parents who are incapable of meeting their children’s physical and emotional needs.
Second, if we accept the reality of reincarnation, we naturally view matters of “life and death” in a whole new light. This perspective is foreign to most Christians and Westerners, however, so even if one is open to the idea, our culturally driven assumptions about life and death tend to color our feelings about subjects like abortion.
If we remember that we get many opportunities to incarnate, and that any soul who “loses” such an opportunity at one point can always inhabit a different body at a later date, all sorts of controversial subjects such as abortion and euthanasia take on new dimensions.
Via my own personal experiences, my spirit communication work and my extensive spiritual studies, I have learned that whether we miscarry or choose to abort a child, it is pretty much the same to the spirit incarnating: it will simply move on and incarnate in some other form later.
As for the controversy over when life “officially” begins, we can learn a great deal from spiritual sources. For example, during my second pregnancy I was psychically awake and aware that my daughter was not in my womb – she was “outside” of me (and communicating with me telepathically), and didn’t enter her body until quickening. In fact, she began to communicate with me in the form of a disembodied spirit before she was even conceived – she was the one who informed me that it was high time I had another baby.
All the spiritual research I’ve read echoes my own experiences. For example, people who have had near death experiences generally report that the soul may enter the fetus at any time between the second trimester and the hours just following birth. Sometimes near death experiences are brought on by abortion, and in these accounts, the women report no sense of condemnation for their decision to abort; instead, they find compassion and understanding for them in Spirit.
The great mystic Edgar Cayce also believed that the soul does not enter the fetus during the first trimester of pregnancy, but may “move in” any time between the end of that period and the hours following birth. Souls may “hang around” a potential mother for some time, trying to decide if they will go through with this particular incarnation, or “getting used to the idea” while bonding with the family. This was also similar to my experience, for even after quickening when I sometimes felt my daughter was in her body in my womb, I often experienced her outside of it again, as though she could come and go as desired.
In Journey of Souls and Destiny of Souls, hypnotherapist Michael Newton, Ph.D., explores what he learned about the nature of life and death when he regressed dozens of patients to the period between their incarnations in the physical. As he explains in Destiny of Souls, he has never seen a single case in which the soul joined the fetus in the first trimester. Here’s what his research revealed about unborn babies:
“There is a universal consciousness of love surrounding all unborn babies. The creative force of existence is never separated from any form of living energy. A fetus can be alive as an individual entity without yet having an immortal soul identity. If a mother aborts her child in the first trimester, there are loving spiritual forces hovering nearby to comfort this mother and watch over the child…Souls know in advance the probabilities of the baby going to term…When a mother loses her child for whatever reason, I have found the odds are quite high that the soul of this baby will return again to the same mother with her next child. If this mother does not bear another child, the soul may return to another close member of the family because that was the original intent…”
This idea is echoed in the work of Carol Bowman, author of Children’s Past Lives and Return from Heaven: Beloved Relatives Reincarnated within your Family. For more information on Carol’s fascinating work, please visit her website, www.childpastlives.org.
So my friend, odds are good that if a soul had already chosen you to be its mother when you aborted, that same soul will return to you when you are truly ready to become a parent. I have personally performed a number of readings in which this was the case.
None of this is meant to suggest that we should be casual about abortion. Certainly it ridiculous to use abortion as a form of birth control. In my view, however, the true problem is our culture’s casual attitude toward sex. As I often tell my children, it is foolish to have sex with someone you would never want to have a child with. The spiritual lesson in the abortion experience is often one related to adopting a more conscious, sacred approach to sex.
As with all big spiritual decisions, our intentions are paramount. When I ask Spirit how to determine the “right” way to deal with an unwanted pregnancy, I hear that each woman must balance love for herself, respect for life and her Creator, and care for the unborn child. This is not the sort of decision that can be made for her by strangers; it is as personal a decision as the spiritual path she chooses to follow and her relationship with the Divine. She must therefore defer to the ultimate authority on such matters: the voice of God that whispers to her in her own heart.
I pray that you will see that in beating yourself up so, you are doing more harm to your own spirit than you did to any other spirit involved in this experience. You too are a child of God, my friend. The only being in the Universe who hasn’t already forgiven you is YOU.
– Soul Arcanum