‘No one knew.”

In a book perfect for the season in every way, including the title, Changed, Alex writes:

No one knew I was spinning out of control.
No one knew I was filled with anger and grief.
No one knew but me.

What Alex knew was that she “couldn’t stand to be alone with” herself. Just after graduating from college, she found out she was pregnant. Engaged, she wanted to have the baby but her fiancé didn’t.

She writes:

Ken calmly explained that having a baby right now didn’t fit into our plans. He said we shouldn’t have a baby until we were married, had been working in our careers longer, and were in a better financial situation.

Practical Ken. “He tried to convince me that our relationship wouldn’t last if I didn’t have the abortion.”

“I thought that if I got it over with quickly — that if I had the abortion early enough in the pregnancy — then I’d be able to cope with it.” Alex went ahead with the abortion.

She immediately regretted it. “I felt the loss of our child from the core of my being. I grieved over my child — our child.”

The relationship didn’t survive the abortion.

It was at a business meeting where she started to confront her grief. The topic of abortion came up and the woman next to her “told the group that she used to favor abortion — until she had one.” Talking to the woman later, she began “connecting the dots between the abortion, the grief, the compulsive spending, and the self-hatred.”

Alex added:

I also found myself telling this woman about my sister’s and my mother’s abortions. This was a secret I’d carried for a long time. I was surprised by the waves of grief and loss I felt as I talked about my missing sibling and my missing niece or nephew. I realized with a jolt how much abortion had changed the fabric of my family, as well as the fabric of my soul.

Changed, as you might have guessed by now, is not an Obama campaign book. It is the companion book to a website called abortionchangesyou.com. The subtitle is Making Sense of Your Own or a Loved One’s Abortion Experience. It is the life’s work (literally) of Michaelene Fredenburg, whose child would have likely graduated from college this past June had she not had an abortion when she found herself pregnant at 18.

The Changed initiative is perfect for this “Change” election. Obama is currently running a commercial attacking the first abortion survivor to appear in a political ad, with the words “despicable lie” as his response to her plea to protect those defenseless who, like her, were born because of a failed abortion. There are likely mothers and fathers — and men and women who, were it not for abortion, would have been parents today: the other abortion survivors — who will react to those ads as they run in Ohio and elsewhere in ways that no one will know.

Sarah Palin just shows up on the stage with her infant Trig, who has Down Syndrome, and a flood of emotions are invited. Her teenage daughter, Bristol, who is pregnant, reminds men and women, parents and children, of choices made, both those that are cherished and regretted.

For anyone who walks away from a campaign commercial, speech, or debate suddenly dealing – as Alex did – with long-submerged emotions, there will be support. On October 13, if all goes according to schedule, New Yorkers will see ads for abortionchangesyou.com on their commute to work on 1,000 subway trains.

If reading the latest New York Times attack on Sarah Palin and her choices makes you regret some of your own choices — perhaps made without support or real choice — look up and see your support.

Stop by abortionchangesyou.com to find directions on how to connect with anonymous peer-support groups online or with abortion-healing ministries and counselors offline. All directions lead somewhere very far away from today’s contentious political debate.

It’s the next step in the abortion debate: actually confronting the pain that so many abortion survivors must live with day after day.

– Kathryn Jean Lopez is the editor of National Review Online.