When Ashley Sigrest confessed to her young children that she'd once had an abortion, her boy Rylan -- the aborted child's younger brother -- exclaimed, "We will see Joshua in Heaven!" (The aborted baby was later so named.)

"I told them something very bad happened to mommy and I got pregnant at 18," she writes in LifeNews. "I was scared, confused and—even though I knew it was wrong—I had an abortion."

Ashley felt compelled to tell them because the Lord had seemed to instruct her to carry a sign outside of abortion clinics that said, "I regret my abortion." Her kids were getting old enough to read.

So sad -- a deep, dark secret.

"They know they can always ask me questions and we don’t have to keep Joshua a secret," she now says. "He is real. He exists. He is loved!"

Indeed. He is real. And if we can believe near-death experiences, as well as those who have visions of the other side while fully alive (such as a woman named Kat Kerr from Jacksonville, Florida), aborted babies have their own realm in Heaven (not "limbo," which the Church has dispensed with).

Claims Kerr, there are "nurseries" in Heaven with arched ceiling that allow in a peach-like illumination for all the babies that are miscarried or aborted. "They are received by Jesus and He heals the wounds of their hearts," she writes (in Revealing Heaven). "They are cared for by angelic beings who sing to them as they rock them in their arms. The breath of God nourishes them as they grow ever so slowly." If nothing else, a nice thought.

When a woman miscarries a baby, asserts Kerr, she later encounters the youngsters and in some cases helps raise the child in Heaven. There is, she says, "a second chance to hold your child in your arms and love and raise it as your own. Many will and they can experience the joy of watching their child (once destroyed and now restored) grow and become a happy, complete being! God desires this restoration in families."

Can there really be any truth to that? Birds singing to unborn infants? "Beds" that come out of the walls like beautiful seashells?

Just a lucid imagination? For our discernment.

"There will be many surprised women, who did not know they had miscarried a baby, because it was so early in the pregnancy," she maintains (and this we can believe).

But none of this should be to downplay the grave nature of abortion -- one of the great sins in history. We know of a woman from Pittsburgh who was blinded by a terrible crash with a truck and after her conversion believed the accident was due to an abortion she'd had: an opportunity, through suffering, to purge the sin while on earth. We know of other cases involving very serious illness, in one case for a man who had been involved in abortions and asked to do his purgatory (after his conversion) on earth.

He suffered illness after illness, one more difficult than the one before.

No downplaying it.

For some, like Ashley, it may be psychological suffering; it may be carrying a sign outside of clinics. For others, it may be darkness after death. Abortion is murder.

But God is a God of Mercy -- above all else.

"Choosing to abort a child has consequences in life and in eternity," said another who glimpsed the hereafter. "While on the other side, I was shown spirits who had inhabited the bodies of fetuses, after their mothers had aborted them. These spirits, as full-blown beings, were capable of reasoning and mature emotions. They understood the limited knowledge of their mortal mothers and were filled with compassion for them. Although the opportunity to come to earth had been taken from them, they loved their mothers. But they also sorrowed for their mother who -- in ignorance -- had destroyed their chance to come to earth."

Joshua? A nursery "up there"?

Consider it all we will.

[Note also: Michael Brown retreats: Louisiana and Kansas City]

[Michael Brown's books]