October 6

My abortion appointment(s)…

I have shared this story many times at gatherings large and small and in a blog I wrote about three years ago. Knowing this Sunday was about Spiritual Adoption, there was no other story I could tell that could proclaim with greater meaning to my heart than the story of my own teen pregnancy, three abortion appointments, and the gift of my son all because of the incredible power of spiritual adoption.

My story is simple and not so simple at the same time. It is about the complex simplicity of sin and the complicated mess of our brokenness. It is about the beautiful, underserving, profound, mystery of God’s presence in our lives and the gentle ways He wraps His arms around us. 

While this is my story, I believe that it is also the story of hundreds of thousands of other women.

It is a story of stumbling into motherhood.

After graduating from a Catholic high school, I set off to college to a school the country’s length away from family to study Aerospace Engineering. My plan had been the same since I was a little girl, I was going to be a pilot in the United States Air Force. I fought hard for my position at the university, earned a significant scholarship, and had stepped into a dream… 

However, college was filled with temptation, and I embraced many of those temptations with open arms. I turned my life and my heart from God and anchored them on the material world around me, a world that promised to chew me up and spit me out if I allowed myself to be all in… It didn’t take long. After Christmas break, during my sophomore year, I took a pregnancy test. It was positive. I was 19.

I remember sitting on floor, feeling desperately ashamed. Desperately alone. 

While I was pro-life, in theory, the only solution I could think of was abortion. It filled the computer screen when I frantically typed “unplanned pregnancy,” it fell from friend’s lips when I shared with them the news, and it was the only “resource” on a small scrap of paper the health services at the university offered me. 

Abortion consumed my thoughts. And soon, my thoughts turned to action... 

When I arrived at my abortion appointment, the woman across the desk greeted me, asking for my name and payment. As I slowly counted my money, she could see the struggle on my face, and in a misguided effort to make to feel better, she said, “It’s okay, honey, not all of us are made to be mothers.”

Not all of us are meant to be mothers…

I just stared at her, then put my money back into my purse and walked out. 

I walked out in frustration because my struggle wasn’t over my worry that I was not meant to be a mother; it was over me not wanting to be a mother anymore. The latter is an entirely different matter — the latter is the ugly truth of what I was there to do. I was there willing to hand over a wad of cash so that I could leave the broken and lifeless body of my son in one of her back rooms… The latter was an entirely different matter altogether.

I wish I could say that I walked out of that abortion facility jolted by the insanity of what I was about to do, but I didn’t. I left because my pride needed the woman who was taking my money not to fluff me with lies. 

I was broken. Broken pieces don’t often make sense.

The following week, when we pulled into the parking lot of the second abortion facility for my new appointment, there was a group of people on the sidewalk praying. Their lowered heads and clasped hands forced me to think about the one thing that I had been working very hard to not think about until this point — God. 

When I left for college, I had closed the door on God. I knew He probably had a poor opinion of some, ok many, of my life decisions since I reached college, and I had no interest in hashing it out with Him. As a pregnant teen desperately procuring an abortion, I didn’t think it was the optimal time for a reckoning… We sat in the car, willing them to go home.

When they didn’t, we did. 

The following week, we silently drove to our third abortion appointment. At this point, I was numb. I felt like a robot going through the motions. I remember watching the clock as we sat in heavy traffic; we were in danger of missing our appointment time. I could see the abortion clinic about 100 meters away, yet we sat, stuck behind a row of cars that had not moved an inch in the past 20 minutes. Staring ahead, I realized what was staring back at me… It was a Choose Life license plate on the back of the truck in front of us. 

After pointing it out to my boyfriend, not much needed to be said, we turned the car around and headed home.

On May 4, 2002, we got married, and on October 10, 2002, our son, Nicholas, was born. Choosing life for Nic wasn’t easy. We both dropped out of school, my husband enlisted, and the rest of the road has been filled with its own heartache of war, deployments, and goodbyes. But, there has never been a moment when I wasn’t grateful for becoming a mother and for all the other beautiful fruit from this (unplanned) life change.

The part of the story that absolutely wrecks me to tears is when I look back over this difficult time to see Christ, who I had closed a makeshift door on, who I had disinvited from my life, who I had treated as inconsequential and disposable, standing before me, wiping my tears with His precious pierced hands.   

I am humbled with feelings of overwhelming unworthiness to see His steady hand guiding my heart. At the first appointment, He used my pride to pull me from the abortion facility. At the second appointment, He stirred strangers to action; listening to His command, they said “yes,” and He placed His disciples before me. At the third appointment, to break through the last vestiges of stone in my heart, He displayed the actual words “choose life” before my eyes through the simple “yes” of a man willing to pay the extra money for a pro-life message on the back of his vehicle. 

It didn’t matter how far I had strayed. He was there. He is always there.

Years later, I learned about "Spiritual Adoption." The Venerable Fulton Sheen encouraged the faithful to "spiritually adopt" an unborn child in danger of being aborted and their parents. Sheen proclaimed with the holy boldness he is so well known for that this prayer—this intentional action of the heart—would save lives. It did. It saved my son—and me. God hears and responds to every. single. prayer. Through His grace, our prayers for one another can move mountains. When we spiritually adopt an unborn child, we won't know exactly who we are praying for—but we can be sure God does.

Here is a guide to spiritual adoption and here is this week’s Pray, Grow, & Serve. There is no better way to teach your child about the sanctity of human life than a daily prayer for the protection of the unborn.

I am not a pilot, but my journey has taken me to places that a plane could never reach. I praise God for His mercy and goodness and invite you to spiritually adopt an unborn child for the next Nic and Kelly.