Answer

How Do I Begin Repenting and Healing After an Abortion?

You are carrying something you may never have said out loud. It might have been years ago. There may have been pressure, fear, or a situation nobody around you understood. Whatever brought you here, the weight of it is real and you have probably been carrying it alone.

Start with this: it is not beyond the Savior’s reach, and you were never meant to carry it by yourself. You can repent, be forgiven, and be fully reconciled to God. That is not a softened version of the doctrine. It is the doctrine. The first step is usually the least dramatic and the hardest one, which is telling one person.

Eternal Truths

The Savior’s invitation is stated without a list of exceptions. After the destruction, He called to the survivors: return unto me, and be converted, that I may heal you (3 Nephi 9:13-14). Healing is what He said He was offering, not merely a verdict.

Godly sorrow is meant to move you, not to keep you. Paul distinguished sorrow that works repentance and leads to life from the sorrow of the world that only wears a person down (2 Corinthians 7:9-10). Elder D. Todd Christofferson called repentance “The Divine Gift of Repentance” for that reason. It is relief, not punishment.

The Church’s own teaching leaves room for your circumstances. The Church’s counsel on abortion opposes elective abortion and also recognises exceptions, and it directs members who need help to their bishop rather than to a rule. God weighs circumstances that no one else saw, in more detail than you could explain them.

What Can Make This Confusing?

Forgiveness often arrives before the grief lifts, and that surprises people. You can be forgiven and still be sad. Sorrow for a child is not evidence that repentance did not take. It is evidence that you understand what was lost, and it softens with time. The other confusion is dread of the bishop’s office. Most people who have gone describe it afterwards as the moment the weight began to shift, not the moment they were judged.

Questions to Think About

• What am I most afraid would happen if I told one person?
• Am I confusing being accountable with being blamed?
• What would it mean to let this be closed rather than carried?

What You Can Do

Make one appointment with your bishop this week. He is not there to reopen the past. He holds keys that let him help you close it. If you are not ready for that, write down what you would say if you were, which is often the step that makes the appointment possible. The essay behind this Answer walks through repentance and healing here in more depth.

Jesus Christ suffered for exactly this so that you would not have to carry it any longer, and He can give you back a clear conscience and, in time, peace about a grief you may always feel.