The Phone Call
Years later, in 2002, Hawes looks back on that decision as the hardest part of a devastatingly painful time in her life – a period she would never want to live through again.
Debbie Hewes walked in the door of her dorm room in McGinnies Hall on the Fredonia State College campus fresh from her Wednesday afternoon jazz dancing class, dressed in a leotard bodysuit and T-shirt.
“Your mom called,” said Amy, her roommate.
That was unusual. Her parents never called on weekdays, because the rates were too high. They always waited until the evenings or weekends.
But maybe it was a sign. All her life, Hewes, a devout Christian and already, at 20, the choir director of her hometown church, had been a big believer in signs and omens – tiny mysterious signals guiding her choices. Maybe the fact that her mother had called in the middle of the day, out of the blue, meant that Hewes should tell her the truth. Right now.
It was the last week of the spring semester, in May 1983, a chilly month in the middle of one of the wettest springs on record. Final exams were coming up. All over campus, students were packing their boxes of belongings and getting ready to leave. Just a few days ago, Hewes had been looking forward to going home to Rochester for the summer.
Now she felt as if she could never go back there again — not where she would have to act like a hypocrite, hiding her horrible secret from everyone.
Hewes picked up the phone and dialed. Her mother's voice on the other end of the line was calm and unsuspecting, but Hewes still hesitated, nervous, as she spoke the fateful words.
“I'm pregnant. And I've made an appointment for an abortion.”
There was a pause. Then her mother, a schoolteacher and a woman who liked to be in control of every situation, said she had been preparing herself for something like this. She had seen glimmers of Hewes's wild behavior and she had been afraid this would happen.
“I don't want you to go to a clinic,” her mother said. “Come back here and go to my doctor — he takes care of things like that.”
Hewes hung up the phone, relieved.
It wasn't until much later that the irony of the situation struck her: Her abortion would be performed by the same man who had delivered her.
The Wild Life
Fredonia, in 1983, was a place where sexual and social mores were changing rapidly. It was also a place where a lone female student from out of town, like Debbie Hewes, who transferred to Fredonia in her sophomore year, could easily get swept up in the wilder side of college life.
The routine was simple. After her classes ended, Hewes, a music major, put on tight jeans and a low-cut top and headed out to the bars, where she drank and danced for hours to the hottest music, tunes like “Sweet Dreams” and “Back on the Chain Gang.” The drinking age was 19; the bars were packed.
That spring, bars like the Caboose, SUNY's and Rascals lured students in with “Meet the Buffalo Bills” events and shows by bands like Silent Mistress, Koolaid Wino and a new group called 10,000 Maniacs. You could get a draft beer for 15 cents on Wednesdays, and Rascals offered 10-cent pizza slices and vodka shot specials for 75 cents.
At closing time, 2 a.m., she sometimes headed for SUNY's, a bar she and her friends affectionately called “Scummy's.” A converted garage on the corner of Water and Canadaway streets, SUNY's was a place where it was easy to find a guy who was willing to take you home — and, in the days before HIV and AIDS were the acronyms on everyone's lips, it didn't really matter if you didn't know him all that well.
By the spring of 1983, Hewes was living a double life. In Rochester, she was known as a good Christian girl, the talented choir director who played piano and sang hymns with the voice of an angel. In Fredonia, she was a party girl.
Her grades dropped steadily, from a 3.7 average to nearly 2.0 — a C average.
By April, when she went home for Easter break, the dividing line between Hewes's two personas was blurred to the point of non-existence.
That's what made it so easy to say yes when a Rochester guy, older and wealthy and already engaged to another woman, asked her out to dinner on Good Friday, two days before Easter Sunday. She knew he was engaged, but she chose to ignore it. After dinner, Hewes went back to the man's apartment.
Six weeks later, back at Fredonia, Hewes missed a period. Disbelieving, she went to the student health center and took a pregnancy test.
After a one-day wait, she learned she was pregnant.
Three days later, after her jazz class, Hewes called her mother and told her she was going to have an abortion.
The Abortion
She climbed up onto the surgical table, in a Rochester hospital, to wait for her mother's doctor. She was a little more than two months pregnant.
Her parents, in the room with her, spoke to her softly, trying to keep her calm. Her dad stood by her legs, rubbing and stroking them. He was crying a little bit. The anesthesiologist came in and picked up a needle.
“You're going to feel a little prick,” he told her, comfortingly. He stuck in the needle.
Hewes felt herself start to fade into unconsciousness. She had a sudden panicky sensation that things were moving too quickly — Do I really want to do this? Did I think about this enough? — but it was too late. The doctor was in the room, getting ready to start the abortion.
It would be a D&C — the frequently used abortion method known as dilation and curettage, which involved inserting a small hooked scraping tool, called a curette, into Hewes's uterus through her cervix, which had been dilated to about the width of a drinking straw. The metal instrument would scrape out the contents of her uterus — the tiny baby, which was about the size of a golf ball, and the uterine lining. A tube, also inserted through the cervix, would suction out the contents of her womb. The abortion would take about 10 minutes.
Just as she felt darkness descending, a wave of nausea hit her.
She began to vomit violently, leaning over the side of the table to spew the disgusting taste out.
It's a sign, she thought to herself. Another mysterious signal telling her to stop the abortion. To back out while there was still time. She struggled to sit up, but she couldn't.
Nausea is normal, said the anesthesiologist's voice in her ear. It happens.
Before she could say anything in reply, Hewes blacked out. When she woke up, she was staring at a clock that told a different time. The wall the clock was hanging on looked different, too. It must have happened, she thought groggily.
Then a crashing wall of pain hit her in the abdomen, a wrenching sensation that felt like her insides were being torn apart.
“There was the feeling that life was ripped out from inside of me,” she says today. “I felt incredible pain. I didn't understand the procedure, but I felt that's what happened.”
Later that day, Hewes fell asleep on the couch in her parents' living room. She slept for a long time — days and days, so long she lost count. She got her period. She swallowed lots of Tylenol. Every once in a while, her mother or father would come in and check on her. They would stroke her arm, tell her everything was OK.
Already, she knew it wasn't.
Hewes suffered guilt and grief immediately after her abortion. But it wasn't until after she got married, in 1986, that her nightmares got really bad.
The Path to Victory
Her wedding that year, to Scott Bastian, was a beautiful affair. The couple seemed made for each other.
Hewes met Bastian, an economics major who grew up on Grand Island, at Fredonia at the beginning of her senior year in 1983, when she returned to college the summer after her abortion. He forgave her, when she finally broke down and told him about it, shortly before Dec. 7, 1983, which she figured would likely have been her baby's due date.
After their marriage, Debbie Hewes Bastian began to have nightmares about children. She would dream of babies outside her bedroom window, crying and begging to be let in. She would wake up in cold sweats, panicking.
Rages, too, became common for her. She would be brushing her hair in the bathroom and suddenly fly into a fit, screaming and breaking her hairbrush.
Finally, seven years after her abortion, Bastian decided to seek counseling. She signed up for an eight-week post-abortion counseling program offered by SonRays Ministries in the City of Tonawanda. As part of the program, Bastian wrote her child a letter, expressing her pain. She cuddled a teddy bear, pretending it was her baby, and unburdened herself of her hurt and grief. She wrote a song about her experience, “Hold You Again,” and sang it before the congregation of her church.
Her single remaining fear, both before and after counseling, was also her biggest one: That she would never be able to have children with Scott because of her abortion. There were no clear answers to that fear; abortion facilities and pro-abortion groups claimed that abortion did not cause problems with future pregnancies, but pro-life groups pointed to research warning that these complications were very real. The uncertainty, for Bastian, was unsettling.
Today, Debbie Hewes Bastian is a music teacher who lives on Grand Island with Scott and their three children. Sarah, the oldest, is 11; Hannah is 5. Her third child is a boy to whom Bastian gave birth on the morning of Easter Sunday 1994, just as the sun was rising.
It was at that moment — so symbolic in the consciousness of a woman who aborted a pregnancy that began on Good Friday — that Bastian felt herself lifted beyond all the grief and guilt over her past.
On that day in 1994, she believes, she was finally healed. She was forgiven. She named her son Joshua, because of what the ancient biblical name means: “The Lord gives victory.”
(This article courtesy of Steven Ertelt and the Pro-Life Infonet email newsletter. For more information or to subscribe go to www.prolifeinfo.org or email infonet@prolifeinfo.org.)
