My husband and I were both twenty-one when we were married; in love, we knew we could conquer the world on a penny and a prayer. I was a college student, determined to go to law school and he was working the swing shift at $7.80 an hour. We were living the newly wed dream. We were not planning on having children for a very long time as we had life plans for our future; but the contraceptive didn’t work and we found ourselves just over six months newly married and pregnant.
I cried almost every day of that pregnancy. The timing was a disaster in my mind. The finances were impossible. The dreams I had were dying before my very eyes. The theme song of my life was “I”. Yet because I knew that life began at conception, an abortion would be murder, plain and simple. Murder is a capital offense before God and I would not kill the life that was growing in me because it cut into my well laid plans.
According to WebMD, I had all the classic reasons to justify an abortion and I fit the list of the most common reasons that teens and young women choose to have an abortion:4
- Awareness that they are not mature enough to have children.
- Knowledge that they are financially not able to support or care for children.
- Concern that having a baby would change their lives and compromise their (and a child’s) future. Many young mothers don’t ever manage to get the education and employment necessary to raise their children above the poverty line.
- Birth control (contraceptive) failure. Over half of all women who have an abortion used a contraceptive method during the month they became pregnant.3
- Physical or mental conditions that endanger the woman’s health if the pregnancy is continued.
I could have checked off each one of these reasons and made the legally justified decision to end the pregnancy, but my belief that all life is sacred and that conception is the beginning of life, countered these selfish reasons to abort this baby.
I continued on with my life, as this new life grew inside mine. I walked to my political science classes, worked my part-time job and dealt with the emotions of life not going the way I planned it. My husband came with me to every doctor’s appointment and was my support. We saw our baby, looking very much like a baby on the ultra sound and we went to birthing classes to prepare for this event. I continued to cry. The day she was born, my tears dried up.
Twenty years and four more children later, my life is very different from the one I had planned, yet I recognize that God knows better that me. I have talked to professionals who have lived their dreams in their pursued fields, but have missed out on what they have discovered as their most important calling on life. I specifically recall a conversation with my doctor, who had just begun practicing medicine. She and I both had had babies around the same time, and she was back at work, doing the job she had dreamed about for a most of her life. She said, “I would love to stay home with my baby, but I have medical school bills to pay and can’t afford not to work.” She was living her life long career dream, but was torn because her heart was with her son. Her work was noble, but she recognized what she was missing not being home.
God gave me a gift of an unplanned pregnancy, because it altered my life course and gave me His life course instead. I am so grateful that I did not have to make the difficult decision to choose career over child raising. I don’t know if I would have chosen rightly. But God in His grace allowed me to hold my baby in my arms, while studying for finals and getting my degree; all the while recognizing that His plans are higher than mine and the job He had for me was to raise a family.
