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NEW YORK, May 3, 2011 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Kassi Underwood’s life after abortion is one that no one would envy.

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But in an op-ed for the New York Daily News on Monday, Underwood, a writer based in New York, explained how she still refuses to judge abortion despite enduring immense grief after having ended the life of her baby.

In the piece, entitled “Get your politics off my grief after abortion,” Underwood notes that groups such as the American Psychological Association have claimed that post-abortion syndrome does not exist – but this has not stopped her from feeling acutely the loss of her missing baby.

In an account that echoes the documented grief of countless other post-abortive women, such as those at Silent No More Awareness, Underwood says that three years after her abortion she began to have nightmares about babies, and missed her “potential child” while awake. “It was bewildering that I could feel so mournful about a decision that was supposed to buttress the architecture of my identity,” wrote Underwood.

“It felt traitorous to admit that, far from thinking I had expelled a ‘blob of cells,’ I now wondered who that person I aborted would have been.”

Underwood indicated that the experience of immediate “relief” following the abortion procedure promised by pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute’s analysis of the post-abortive experience was not as simple as might appear to the uninitiated.

“It was the kind of relief I have felt after losing someone to a prolonged battle with cancer: grateful the suffering had ended, but sorry my loved one had to go,” she noted.

Seeking refuge in the pro-choice movement offered little help for Underwood: “Emotions, I learned, could be regarded as a chink in the pro-choice armor,” she said. The writer also complained of a political angle at a Catholic Rachel’s Vineyard retreat she attended, accusing directors of turning retreatants into “political instruments” by urging them to tell Congress how abortion had hurt them.

Underwood says she eventually settled in a movement that encourages women to speak about abortion, but without judging whether the procedure is morally right or wrong.

“Here’s a right I’d march for: the right to wail myself to sleep, to yearn for my long gone baby, yet to know that I needed to delay parenthood,” Underwood concluded. “Transcending heartache is possible as long as I keep my story unabridged – and out of the political sphere.”