A woman’s abortion at 18 haunted her through her twenties and into her marriage when she suffered three miscarriages because of uterine scarring. Riddled with shame and regret, she underwent surgery to restore her womb and intense spiritual healing to repair the damage to her soul.
Today, she is rescuing people from the dark lies of abortion and delivering them to the redeeming light of truth.
At 40, Ashley Steinhauer is a nurse practitioner and pro-life advocate living in Covington, Louisiana, her home state. She and her husband, Cassidy, share a son, Cross, 8, and a daughter, Collins, 6.
Misled in her youth by a lack of knowledge of what is appropriate, good, and healthy, Ashley wishes she had known at 18 what she knows today.
“I believe I was deceived,” she told The Epoch Times. “Maturity and wisdom come with age, but I wish I would have had that wisdom and maturity earlier on, because I wouldn’t have made the decision that I made. I would have been able to see beyond the myopic vision of the scary situation I was in at that moment.
“We are deceived ... I believe there’s the degree of deception, both from Satan, and also, just politically speaking, [from] so many people with the agenda of pro-choice and promoting abortion. They’re going to minimize and downplay the reality and the darkness of what abortion is ... [and] people get desensitized.”
She believes things will change if schools start showing children the truth, instead of forcing sex education on kids and advocating the deceptive thoughts of “you have to accept that a man can be a woman and a woman can be a man.”
She said: “Show teenagers what truly happens in an abortion, but you‘d have to be honest about it. You’d have to say it’s more than just a blob of tissue. It’s an actual human life and a human being.
‘My Life Was Over’
At 18, Ashely was in her second college semester at Southeastern Louisiana University, living at home with her mom and stepdad to save money. She had been with her boyfriend for about a year when she became pregnant.“I was on birth control, so obviously I was very surprised,” Ashley said. “I just was very scared immediately because ... I believed the lie that if I got pregnant, if I had a baby, my life was over.”
While “not atheist,” Ashley had favored drinking and partying over regular church attendance. She was not close with her mom and didn’t feel able to go to her for advice. She deduced that she must be around six to eight weeks pregnant. Terrified and without support, she found an OBGYN clinic in nearby New Orleans and asked a friend to accompany her there.
On March 24, 2000, Ashley entered the clinic.
She said: “I was instructed before going that day to take a pill. I think it was a Valium, something to that effect, just to make me more relaxed. When I got there I wasn’t completely out of it; I could walk and I could talk, but I was still inhibited, so to speak. I remember signing in at the front desk, sitting down, and I remember the waiting area just being very plain, very gray.
“I went back by myself, and the nurse got me into position on the bed ... the ultrasound machine was to the right of me. The physician walked in and ... basically said ‘Hi, okay, let’s get started.’ I never had any kind of counseling or anything like that. I never had anybody talk to me about options.”
Ashley looked over to the ultrasound screen and saw her baby. Before she could react, a “very immediate, fast, abrupt, aggressive suction procedure” began and before she knew it the abortion was over.
“I was awake, I could have a conversation, but I wasn’t totally coherent like I am right now,” Ashley said. “I try to be very humble and very honest to the best of my ability with my memories of the situation. I never want to overdramatize things to seem as though I don’t have full responsibility for what I did ... however, I definitely was under the influence.”
‘Nobody Helped Me’
Ashley’s friends, who were equally deceived by the women’s liberation and abortion lies, had not tried to stop her. A friend’s father even gave her $500 to pay for the abortion.“He was a good man, I don’t think ill of him, I think he was just trying to help and did not know any better,” Ashley said.
“I had a lot of anger,” she said. “I was still so angry that nobody helped me, that nobody stopped me, that nobody tried to talk me out of it. I had a lot of shame because ... I took the life of my child. I drank a lot, I was much more insecure even than I was before, and I was very guarded.
“I tried to forget. I tried to just tuck it away and pretend like it never happened.”
Ten years after her abortion, on Feb. 19, 2010, Ashley married Cassidy. Terrified that she would miscarry their baby, she decided to tell him about her abortion but worried she would be judged.
She said: “I felt at that point that I didn’t deserve to have a baby, you know? So then I told my husband, and that was really difficult, because I just felt like he was going to look at me so differently. Would he regret marrying me? But he was very supportive and understanding.”
Cassidy supported his wife, but Ashley’s fear was realized; she miscarried their first three pregnancies due to scars in her uterus, sustained during her abortion.
Medics at the Fertility Institute in New Orleans—ironically linked with the hospital where Ashley had her abortion—explained that the embryos had attached at the site of the scar tissue, and could not get the nutrients they needed from the placenta to survive.
Ashley believed her doctors tried to “sugarcoat” their diagnosis; she felt fully responsible for losing her babies. She and Cassidy were offered a procedure, a uterine septoplasty to repair the site of the scar tissue, and prayer led them to an affirmative answer.
‘It’s Not a Clump of Cells’
Months later, Ashley became pregnant again. She was working with breast cancer patients at the time and had access to ultrasound machines in the oncology ward. She watched her babies grow.“I’ve looked at all of my babies with ultrasound and could see heartbeats, the buds of their hands and feet, the head. I mean, it’s incredible,” she said.
“At six weeks, you can see where their little spinal cord and vertebrae are beginning to form. Absolutely, it’s not a clump of cells. It’s not a clump of tissue. It’s absolutely a formed human being.”
Ashley gave birth to Cross on March 25, 2014, and experienced unconditional love for a child for the very first time. At the same moment, her perfect baby boy made her abortion all the more unbearable.
The group changed Ashley’s life. Through Bible study, engaging with fetal models at different stages of development, and a memorial service for lost babies, the few women in the small, intimate group faced the reality of their abortions and learned to forgive their past selves.
After her transformative experience, Ashley began co-hosting the group, and eventually became its leader.
Ashley said: “I know how many women there are just like I was, they’ve reached out to me privately. I know they’re Christians, they have so much shame and guilt because they have this pressure to look and be so perfect ... but if you look in the Bible, none of them were.
Walk Through Healing
Today, Ashley advocates for unborn babies and pregnant mothers and attends public rallies to spread the pro-life message. She has spoken at Washington, D.C.’s March for Life more than once and claims while the pro-choice opposition is “angrier and louder,” sharing the pro-life message with confidence takes away the power of the darkness.“If you truly have an awareness of the reality of the human life that is living and breathing and growing inside of you, then how could you willingly and knowingly murder that child? Why should we be able to do that, to take the life of a child, just because it’s vulnerable and cannot speak yet? That’s inhumane.”
Ashley meets women in their sixties and seventies at every rally, who tell her that her story echoes their own. Many could not bear children, some even had to have their uterus removed. Ashley continues to share her story to help prevent this from becoming a reality for more women.
“At the end of our lives, it doesn’t matter what people think of us, but it matters who we’ve helped and who we’ve served. If even one person would choose to keep the life of their child, it’s worth it, to walk through healing and be honest about how it impacted you. That way, it will stop other people from making the same decision,” Ashley said.
