By Chris Surber

Discarded children are not the only victims of abortion. The first in a long line of secondary victims are the women who have them.

Our callous culture falsely convinces women in droves that abortion is the only way out of a tough situation.

They are beguiled by its legalization and bedeviled by its offering of a quick fix. They are convinced that the life inside them is a poison that — if not removed — will ruin their future.

The saddest part of this lie is that the opposite is so often true. Years later, a young lady, perhaps now married and in a happy life, hears the cry of her newborn and it triggers the memory of a past abortion.

She stuffs the memory back deep in her mind. She locks the key on her heart. She begs the memory to go away. But it won’t. The psychological scar of abortion runs deep.

She now realizes she was an accomplice to murder. Legal or not, she knows it was dastardly immoral. She hurts. She regrets. She’s yet another victim of a society that has murdered its conscience and legitimized infanticide.

In 2002 David Reardon of the Elliot Institute studied 173,000 American women who became pregnant and then either had abortions or carried to term. The survey followed them for eight years after the pregnancy ended. He discovered that women who aborted were 154 percent more likely to commit suicide than women who gave birth.

This isn’t new. It’s only the most recent in a long trail of ways that our culture has victimized women and continues to do so.

Our culture tells little girls they must look like a Barbie dolls and wonders why our daughters have eating disorders. We dress the same little girls in scanty outfits and then act surprised when the sex appeal mindset we’ve drilled into them nearly from birth leads to unplanned pregnancy at 16.

Parents sign off on an abortion — or the girl gets it legally without their knowledge — and then years later she wakes up one morning to her new baby’s cuddle, causing her soul to wake up the fact that she hired a hit-man with a medical license to murder a baby in her womb 10 years ago.

When is our society going to stop victimizing women this way? When will we cease to be blissfully blind to what abortion is doing in our communities? When will we fight, not only for the unborn but for these young women? When we will stop seeing them as the culprit and realize they are victims as well?

Stop lying to my daughter. Stop telling her that abortion is a choice to rectify an unwanted consequence, when in fact it carries an array of painful consequences itself.

Only the truth about abortion will ever make our daughters free from its victimization. Only the truth can make us free.

Chris Surber is pastor of Cypress Chapel Christian Church in Suffolk. Visit his website at www.chrissurber.com.