By BEN JOHNSON
WASHINGTON, D.C. (LifeSiteNews) — Fr. Stephen Imbarrato is a father who regrets lost fatherhood.
Fr. Imbarrato has served as a priest for 10 years and founded two pro-life organizations in the Archdiocese of Santa Fe: Project Defending Life and Protest ABQ.
He’s also a father who lost children to abortion.
Long before he was ordained or became a seminarian, Stephen Imbarrato got his girlfriend pregnant and told her “it would be best if you had the abortion,” Fr. Imbarrato told hundreds of young people at the annual March for Life Youth Rally in Washington, D.C., the afternoon of January 21.
He said “what many men do…I’ll support you, whatever you decide.” After she decided to have an abortion, “we both got very guilty quickly,” he said. “We parted ways.”
He would find his calling as a parish priest and pro-life advocate.
One day, counseling young women on the sidewalk outside the abortion facility where his girlfriend had aborted years earlier, he became convicted by God over his role in the long-ago abortion.
With his bishop’s permission, he contacted his old flame through mutual friends. “I apologized to her and took full responsibility for talking her into having the abortion,” he told the young people. “Tears came to her eyes, and I knew this was what she needed to hear.”
Then she told him something he needed to hear. “I said, ‘I feel blessed that at least we have a baby in Heaven’,” Fr. Imbarrato said.
“She said, ‘We have two babies in Heaven’.”
“I asked, ‘There were two abortions?’”
“She said, ‘No, I never told you. It was twins’.”
“Then I realized she had been struggling with that secret all her life, for 35 years,” he said.
He named their unborn babies Mary and Thomas.
At the January 22 March for Life, Fr. Imbarrato — who now works for Priests for Life and is the first man to speak as part of the Silent No More Awareness Campaign — carried a sign that says, “I Regret Lost Fatherhood.”
Numerous speakers with Silent No More told the teens and tweens, who had come as far as California and Canada, that they regret their abortion, or their role in the abortion industry.
Jewels Green, a one-time abortion facility worker in Pennsylvania, remembered how she felt she had no choice but to abort. “At 17, I’m a high school dropout, a drug user, and I wanted to keep my baby,” she said. But “I knew no one who supported my decision to parent.”
Feeling pressure from every side, “I surrendered — 27 years, 15 days ago,” she said. “And it nearly killed me — not physically, but the emotional aftermath was swift and severe, and within a couple of weeks, I attempted suicide.”
Facing up to her “role in the death of my first child and my role in the deaths of thousands of children in the clinic” led her “to spiritual conversion, healing.”
She thanked God that she failed to end her life but hopes no other young woman will go through what she did.
Standing behind her, another former Planned Parenthood worker, Catherine Adair, held a sign that matched Jewels’, reading, “I Regret Providing Abortions.” After Green concluded her heartfelt presentation, Adair hugged her.
Other speakers had a personal tie to allegations that Planned Parenthood sells aborted babies’ body parts.
Nancy Tanner revealed that Planned Parenthood coerced her into signing a release form to “donate” her child’s body in Washington, D.C.
“In the broken state I was in, and imagining I had no choice, I gave in,” she said. “Imagine watching the Planned Parenthood videos that were released this year,” she told the crowd.
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