Quilt of remembrance

Michelle and Jerry Shelfer set a welcoming table: homemade herbal tea served in china teacups, peanut butter cookies, and an assortment of dark chocolate. A warm fire crackles nearby on an unusually cool May afternoon. But the topic the Shelfers want to discuss—post-abortion trauma—hardly attracts a steady flow of company.

For nearly a decade, Michelle has offered post-abortion counseling at the Marin (Calif.) Pregnancy Clinic. She has hosted occasional workshops at local churches in which she and her husband Jerry share their personal story of post-abortion regret and healing.

Two years ago, Michelle said a dream prompted her to revisit her artist background and begin a project to memorialize the billions of “faceless” children lost to abortion. The project is also intended to help post-abortive parents heal and experience Christ’s forgiveness and grace, as she and Jerry have in their 40 years of marriage.

Michelle and I first met in 2015 to discuss abortion regret as I reported on a popular push to normalize and celebrate abortion (see “Pro-abortion and proud of it,” Jan. 24, 2015). She shared her story of how pro-abortion ideals—she was raised in a family of San Francisco artists with parents who encouraged her to explore her sexuality—led her to abort her and Jerry’s first child in her early 20s. After the abortion, Michelle could not shake the pain and regret. She ultimately found forgiveness and saving grace in Jesus Christ.

Seven years after I reported that story, Roe v. Wade is gone, but some things haven’t changed. Michelle said most women, including many in church pews, still conceal their past abortions, holding on to shame and guilt. Of those who make appointments to talk with Michelle, many cancel or never call back. “They want the help, they desperately need the help, but they also run away from the help,” said Michelle. In 2020, she wrote a book addressing post-abortion trauma, Prepare a Room.

Now she has turned to art. Each day, for 778 days, Michelle has painted a portrait of a child. She uses various art mediums—chalk, acrylic, oil, pencil, watercolor, and digital. Michelle depicts the children as she imagines they might have looked had they not been aborted. She calls them “The Foundlings” and shares the portraits on her various social media platforms.

Michelle’s artwork has been printed onto organic cotton and made into a giant quilt. The Shelfers hired a quilter who uses freehand to sew the panels. The quilt is now 35 feet by 10 feet and includes 500 depictions of children. The couple travels with the quilt to various churches, using it as a tool to “put the message out about life,” Jerry said as he unrolled one large panel for me to see.

The children portrayed on the quilt are colorful and racially diverse, close up and far away, and of various ages—a teen, curled up in bed; a boy with a baseball cap and glove; a child with his face painted like a cat; a chunky baby in a purple swimsuit sitting in the sand at the beach.

Over tea, I asked Michelle how women who experience abortion trauma react when they see the quilt. She said they often fixate on one particular child. One woman asked Michelle if she would be willing to depict what her aborted child might have looked like. “They are looking for what they lost among the faces … it can be overwhelming,” Michelle said.

The Shelfers said part of their own healing involved imagining the child they aborted “as an ambassador of God’s grace and forgiveness.” Shortly after her abortion, Michelle became pregnant a second time, but that time, she walked out of an abortion facility, choosing life. That child, a son, is now married, as is the Shelfers’ daughter. They now have 12 grandchildren.

“Our hope is that the quilt acts as a ministry, that there would be a message that the children are saying, ‘Come and be forgiven; receive what God has for you, instead of bearing that terrible weight of guilt,’” Michelle said.

The Shelfers’ message is especially poignant in California, where lawmakers seek to establish the state as an “abortion sanctuary” after the U.S. Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade in June. Pregnancy center directors in the San Francisco Bay Area told me they expect increased attacks and attempts to shut them down.

The Shelfers hope to create a coffee table book with Michelle’s “Foundlings” artwork. On Oct. 22, they will display the quilt during a four-hour “day of healing from the hurt of abortion” event at a church in Novato, Calif. Jerry and Michelle envision opening a local center where the quilt would be permanently housed to host “celebrations of life and grieving for the loss of life.”

“California is a spiritually dark place where the cult of death is powerful and strong. … This is where the message needs to be heard more than anywhere else,” Michelle said.