The Women Who Have Influenced Me

"I felt like I lost who I was," she said looking back over her abortion experience. She was married to an abusive man that landed her in the hospital. While she was in the hospital, her abusive husband consented to surgery for her that caused her to both lose the baby she was carrying and prevented her from ever being able to have children again. "I was angry, heartbroken, and felt betrayed," she told me, "and no one around me seemed to understand how much grief and loss I felt. I wasn't really allowed to grieve. Instead of burying my child, I felt pressure to bury my grief. Every year, I don't have to look at the calendar to know what day it is; I cry on that day every year. The surgery was not necessary to save my life, and neither was losing my child."

Another woman confided, "I got over the rape, but I never got over the abortion." She was not even considering an abortion until the doctor mentioned it as an option. It wasn't until after it was too late that she realized the gravity of what she was doing. "For the first time," she said, "I realized that was my son. They said he was just a clump of cells, but that wasn't true. He was perfect. He was perfectly formed with a face and fingers and toes and terribly scalded, and it was too late for me to save him. I held him in my hand until the nurse came in, grabbed him from me and threw him into a bedpan. I killed my firstborn son."

When she saw the positive pregnancy test, she got an appointment with her doctor to confirm pregnancy. At the appointment, he asked how she would feel about being pregnant. She was poor with small children at home and didn't want to sound as excited as she felt because she didn't want to seem irresponsible for not using birth control. During the examination, instead of confirming pregnancy, the doctor said, "let's restart your period". He quickly inserted an instrument through her cervix and disrupted her early pregnancy.

A few years ago, I was walking alongside a young teenage couple who both wanted their baby and were planning to get married. Within the month, the grieving father called me, "her mother slipped the abortion pill into her food," he said.

A young college student was housesitting for a friend when the apartment she was staying in was broken into. She was violently raped. When she went to the hospital, they gave her "emergency contraception". She said, "The hospital told me it was just protocol after a rape. It made me violently ill. It put my body into so much pain and bleeding .... If I'd known how terrible it would be, I never would have consented to it. I would have rather been pregnant."

"His smile," another woman told me, "every morning his smile is worth everything, He's the reason I get up every morning. I wouldn't trade his smile for anything in the world. I'm so glad I didn't have an abortion."

"Here's my beautiful baby girl," she texted me. "I'd always wanted a girl," she said. "After two boys, I'd given up on a girl." She almost aborted the girl she had always wanted. When she came to the pregnancy center, five doctors were pressuring her to abort due to potential health concerns, and her husband didn't want another baby. I would call her every few days to ask how she was, and we'd often go for a walk and stroll her boys who were both under the age of four years old. She invited me to her ultrasound. And then she texted me from another state with the photo of her beautiful baby girl. Unlike most of my experiences with women, there never seemed to be a single turning point where she chose to carry her baby. Every few days and then every week I'd call and listen to whatever was happening in her life, offer encouragement and humor and let her know I was there for her if she just needed someone to talk to. After she texted the photo, I called. "What made the difference for you?" I asked. "You were there," she replied.

Early in my advocacy days, we called the pregnancy center rooms "birthing rooms" or "life rooms" because that's where we led women to Christ and they chose life for their babies. One Saturday, I didn't want to go for my volunteer shift as an advocate, and my own children were making it very difficult to leave the house. I managed to force myself to go. That day, I had the joy of leading three women to the Lord. I got to pray with them to receive Jesus as their Lord and Savior. It's where I learned that sometimes ministry is just showing up. Sometimes it's just obedience and seeing what God will do.

One woman had driven several hours to keep her secret from the small town where she lived. She wouldn't even give me her real name, and no phone number to follow up. I listened and asked questions and shared information. And then she left. I prayed for her but didn't know what happened. Then one day, after just hearing that one of my clients had aborted her three-month-old, and I'd been crying over that baby and her that morning, I walked into the pregnancy center where a man and a woman had their backs to me. I was not scheduled to come in that day, and upon seeing me, the receptionist's mouth dropped open. "They were just asking for you," she announced in disbelief. As she said that, the woman turned around, a baby in her arms. "I wanted to thank you for my baby," she said, and she placed him in my arms. "We got married," she continued. The handsome man beside her was beaming with the proud smile of a father.

More recently at a pregnancy center, I felt the Holy Spirit nudge me to share the hope of salvation with the woman in front of me. "That's it!" she exclaimed loudly. "I was staying in a hotel last night and was flipping through the channels. There was a (tele-evangelist), and I asked God if He was real to show me how to know Him." She asked Christ to forgive her sins and come into her life that day. And she chose life for her baby. More than a year later in a town a few hours away, I saw her across a parking lot. She recognized me, too. The hardness of her face had softened. She looked so light and beautiful. And I got to meet her beautiful little boy sitting in the shopping cart with hair just like hers.

One woman screamed at me over the phone with so many expletives. She had an appointment at an abortion clinic that week. But her prolife doctor had gotten permission from her to share her phone number with me. When I called, her screaming was so intense that I had to hold the phone away from my ear. God kept me calm. I was able to listen and ask questions and schedule an appointment for her at the Pregnancy Center before her appointment with death. At the pregnancy center, I kept listening and asking her questions so she could process. After putting a fetal model into her hand the size of her baby, she finally asked, "Will it feel pain?" I took a deep breath, and with sadness and empathy, I softly told her the truth, "yes." I answered almost in a whisper. Tears began to roll down her face. "I can't do that," she said. The woman who had screamed at me over the phone was crying. I got to be there as she looked upward and said, "God, you have to help me." We prayed together and she began attending church. It was 2020, and she was allowed only one person in the delivery room. I had the privilege of being the one she called to be with her. She was planning to place her child for adoption, but when she held him in her arms, she couldn't let him go.

At the pregnancy center, we gave whatever a woman needed to bring her baby home with no strings attached. And I met with women as long as needed. Women would pop by to visit as their children played nearby to talk about whatever was on their mind. Women who had never stepped foot in a church would ask questions about God and what that would mean in their life.

One day, a homeless teenage girl took a positive pregnancy test. Just that morning, someone had donated a complete nursery set. I felt God tell me that donated nursery was for her. It didn't make sense since she was homeless, but I brought it out and said someone donated it that morning and I thought it was just for her. She gasped, "that's my favorite color!" and she told me how her biggest obstacle was not that she was homeless but that she wouldn't have a nursery for her baby. She took the set, made amends with her parents, and several months after the baby was born as I dropped off more baby items for her, her parents were gushing about their new grandbaby. It was obvious that he had become the center of their world.

One woman was giddy with excitement. She was about to meet her forty-year-old son. She had planned an abortion, but because abortion was illegal, she had been driven to an airport with men in black suits standing by a private jet. They couldn't tell her where she was going. The whole thing seemed scary to her, so instead of aborting, she placed her son for adoption. That was before open adoption where she didn't know where her son had been placed. After forty years, he had found her and she was so excited to get to meet him.

These and the testimonies of hundreds of other women that honored me with their stories have influenced my resolve to protect children and the mothers who carry them. There is such a difference in the countenance of a mother who continued pregnancy and gave birth - such a softness and love in her face - compared to the women who chose to terminate their pregnancies. Abortion hardens women's hearts. It makes their love grow cold. They need the redemption and healing of Christ to "replace a heart of stone with a heart of flesh." There is a different relationship between them and the children they have, will have, or may never have and with the men they have them with. Mothers who go through hardship to give birth to children mature in love, sacrificing themselves for others rather than sacrificing others for themselves. They show the definition of motherhood. They show the best side of humanity. And they enjoy the incredible gift of a child and accomplishment of motherhood. I have seen women overcome health issues, partner violence, homelessness, pressures from parents, abandonment, and personal fears to be mothers for their children.

These women's stories and many more have influenced the way I see motherhood and pregnancy. They've shaped my resolve. They've fashioned my way of speaking and thinking. Their stories matter. Both the tragedies and the triumphs. In the hundreds of women who I have had the honor to walk alongside, I have not seen abortion help one woman. While it may provide temporary relief, it causes long-term grief. I have not seen pregnancy and childbirth harm one woman. In fact, it's quite the opposite. Abortion harms women. And pregnancy and childbirth have transformed many women into beautiful loving mothers.

I do not claim to understand this verse in Scripture, but because it's in the Bible, I know it is true. I still ponder what it can mean. Perhaps I've had glimpses of it in the eternal sense of a woman's spirit of what God intended for a woman to be. This is what it says: "Nevertheless she will be saved in childbearing if they continue in faith, love, and holiness, with self-control." (1 Timothy 2:15, NKJV)

Childbirth is a purifier. If she's honest, I believe every woman is afraid and anxious about what kind of mother she will be. Even if she's excited, too. This natural reaction is preyed upon by a sinful, evil death industry and many in the "health" profession who either don't know what is actually good for women or take advantage of the ignorance of those around them. It's not compassionate to rip a child from their mother - either for the child or the mother. And it's not fair for medical snobs to pressure women into aborting their beautiful children or to exclude the fathers. Women and men were not created to be enemies. And mothers were not meant to see the happiness God would bring them through their children as burdens.

Love changes everything. Underneath it all is a mother's love for her child. You just have to find it. And in every temptation, God promises there is always a way out. You just have to look for it. The world is upside down. In the sacrifice of love is joy. And in the selflessness of love is an abundant life that's complex and beautiful. That's not just my opinion. That's the experience of hundreds of women who have honored me by letting me get to be a part of their story. The women who I have cried with during pain and joy, in hope and heartache, because after all, we are just women helping women.

When we live according to Scripture, we reap the rewards. And when we fail, there's a redemptive decision ahead.

"Older women likewise are to be reverent in their behavior, not malicious gossips nor enslaved to much wine, teaching what is good, so that they may encourage the young women to love their husbands, to love their children, to be sensible, pure, workers at home, kind, being subject to their own husbands, so that the word of God will not be dishonored." (Titus 2)