To say I came from a dysfunctional family would be an understatement. I also grew up in the time before there were social services available or places to report child abuse. It was a time that sex ed in school consisted entirely of a girl learning about menstruation, and I grew up in small town USA. My father began molesting me around the age of 2. He was into some very terrible things and as I grew older included giving me sexually over to his friends as well, and even a gang rape with him there. It’s very difficult to even write this, but it is the reality of what happened. When I was 13 years old, I became pregnant by one of these encounters. I remember my mother one day saying to me in front of my dad, “that’s strange, your stomach’s getting fat but you’re not getting fat anywhere else.” I didn’t even know what pregnancy was, how a pregnancy was conceived, nothing. My dad took me for an abortion to cover his crimes; I was drugged and didn’t even know I was carrying a baby. I woke up right after the procedure. The trauma the abortion produced in me was so great I literally pushed it down, until years later when I was old enough and strong enough to deal with it. The only people the abortion benefited were my father and his friends.

Perhaps if the pregnancy had continued, the sexual abuse would have been caught and those involved brought to justice.

After I was married, I had my first child. I didn’t understand at the time what was happening to me, but my husband would find me, nearly every night, crawling on the floor in my sleep and crying and wailing, “Where’s my baby?” I couldn’t understand it, as my child was always in his crib, safely and soundly sleeping. It wasn’t until years later that I realized, from this depth of my being, I was looking for my first baby.

As I got older and began to deal with the abuse in my life, and the resulting abortion, I don’t even have words to tell you how painful it was. I even wondered if a person could die of crying so much. I nearly lost my mind, and I was very suicidal. I was literally unable to function for a period of time. The part that was unbearable to me was that my child lost her life.

Mine is the case nearly everyone thinks that abortion is really the only solution to, and the case where everyone thinks it’s fine. But as one who LIVED it, perhaps you’d let me share another perspective. The abortion traumatized me much more than being raped did. I healed much easier over being raped by my father, than by losing my child’s life to abortion. Abortion added violence upon violence. No, I didn’t choose to get pregnant, but it was not her fault either. We were both victims of something very wrong. But, she still was a part of me, she was my child and her life however short, impacted mine forever. I would give nearly anything if I could have carried her to term and placed her for adoption in a loving home. I would at least have known a precious life would have been lived out and had something valuable to show for all the suffering I went through. I also could have had the hope to perhaps meet her and have a relationship with her when we both grew up. I would have the hope of possibly getting to enjoy grandchildren & great grandchildren through her. I literally lost generations. I have nothing to show for that pain except that I have received the comfort and love of God through it, and while I am grateful for that beyond words, there could have been another way. A better way. An abortion doesn’t make a rape go away, or make it as if it didn’t happen. A child might be the ONLY good thing to come out of a horrific situation like that. Abortion was NOT the right answer and it did NOT solve my problem!

-Rachel R.