Clinic encourages women to post farewell messages to their aborted children

These are letters from women who have just had abortions at the Allegheny Reproductive Health Center in East Liberty. They are posted — dozens of them — on the walls of the clinic for other patients to read and to think about.

They are not easy to read, but then, “what about abortion ever is easy?” asks Claire Keyes, center executive director.

“Life is not simple. No one ever came into my clinic saying, ‘Hello there, I want to exercise my constitutional right to an abortion.’ “

Fathers and boyfriends are allowed to express their feelings: “This situation is very hard for me and my girlfriend, but this is the only thing we can do,” said one. “I would like to have a baby with her,” adds another, who writes in a special journal kept for men in the clinic’s waiting room. “But not now, not like this, a mistake.”

Keyes, 61, is a veteran of the abortion rights movement and has been with the center for 25 years. She describes herself as strongly supportive of legalized abortion, approved in the Roe vs. Wade Supreme Court decision 31 years ago this coming Thursday .

But in the 1980s, something began to dawn on her.