Jen grew up to be a stunningly beautiful girl. When she was in junior high, her mother began to reveal the circumstances of her birth. Jen’s mother was twelve years old when she was raped. All Jen knows about her father is that he was a neighbor. Her mother didn’t know him. It was several months before she even knew she was pregnant.
When her family found out, they decided that it was impossible for her to keep a baby that was conceived in such a way. Although they were “personally against abortion,” this was a situation that justified it. Rape is unacceptable, and pregnancy just put one terrible experience upon another. She was a child herself. There was no way she could raise a child. She would have to have an abortion.
Jen’s mother was hurting and humiliated from her recent experiences, and all the adults were telling her that this was the quickest way to forget about the rape and get on with her life. She didn’t even feel like it was a baby inside her. All she knew was that she wanted her memories erased. She wanted to start clean.
However, as the scheduled abortion drew near, she felt a growing dread. It was as though her heart was resisting. As much as she wanted to end the pregnancy, a deeper instinct, some deep down emotion, told her to hold on to her baby. She didn’t know why.
The day of the abortion came. Jen, who was already a healthy little baby inside her mother, was happily unaware of the kind of death prepared for her. She was probably doing her little exercises or sleeping peacefully when her mother was admitted to the clinic. The abortion was a saline injection. Perhaps Jen tried to swim away from the needle as it probed for her. Perhaps she cried as her skin began to burn, but no one heard her. The doctor injected the burning salt, gave her mother some pills and told her to come back the next day.
Jen’s mother went home in tears and spent the day and following night in a waking nightmare. Being handled and probed in the clinic made her feel sick, so soon after her assault. Images of death kept haunting her mind. “I’ve killed my baby,” was all she could think. She also felt excruciating pain in her lower abdomen, and bled on and off. Sometimes she prayed that she could turn back time. Sometimes she despaired.
The next day, she went back to the clinic. “I’m sorry,” she was told, “the doctor isn’t in yet.” While she was waiting for the doctor, some nurses gave her an examination. She was numb from pain and exhaustion when they brought her some unexpected news. “You’ll have to come back later this afternoon. The abortion didn’t work.”
Jen’s mother sat in the clinic, stunned. Perhaps she would be able to give birth to her baby after all! From that moment on, she felt that she’d been given a second chance. She went home and demanded to keep her baby. When her family saw that she was determined, they gradually let go of their abortion idea and left her alone. She began to do what she could to take care of herself and her baby.
Jen was born a few months later, a tiny, beautiful baby with blue eyes and black hair. The only harm from the saline was some mild scarring on the skin on her side and back. Her mother never found out why Jen was spared from the effects of the injection. Perhaps the nurse administered the wrong dose, or the doctor miscalculated where to inject.
Jen grew up to be a stunningly beautiful girl. When she was in junior high, her mother began to reveal the circumstances of her birth. Jen forgave her mother and the two have a remarkable friendship to this day. They are united by their passion for spreading the message of life.
Jen is the result of a botched abortion. Today, Jen is a mother with children of her own. The failure of the abortionist was the success of a beautiful life. So many people are against abortion personally, but believe “it must be legal for cases of rape and incest.” When Jen tells her story, few people can hold onto this position. To suggest that victims of rape should have abortions is to suggest that Jen should not be standing in front of them. It is to insist that Jen’s mother should have gone through life haunted by her abortion, and without Jen, who is her best friend. It is to insist that Jen’s life doesn’t count.
Jen’s life is a powerful counter-message. Even though she was conceived in rape, her birth was the beautiful flower growing in the ghetto of her mother’s past. She maintains that children that may result from rape are the “other victims”. Like their mothers, they are innocent victims of a violent crime. Her mother feels that giving life to her daughter has truly “turned back time.” It was her daughter’s love that healed her memories of the sexual assault and enabled her to start clean.
(The Daily Signal) Katelynn Perry sat in her bathtub doing Google searches on her phone. Was there a way to save her unborn baby?
She had taken the first chemical abortion pill that day and had decided she was not going to take the rest.
After visiting Planned Parenthood, Perry says she “knew that taking that first pill was wrong,” adding, “I shouldn’t have let them influence me.”
Perry already had four kids when she found out she was pregnant with her fifth child, and given the financial struggles she and her husband were facing, she had decided to visit Planned Parenthood to discuss her options.
“When I tried to ask questions, they were kind of shot down. They weren’t really answered in full,” Perry said of her trip to the clinic. “They used a lot of medical terms that I didn’t understand.”
After taking the first abortion pill at Planned Parenthood, Perry was instructed to go to her local pharmacy to pick up the other pills to complete the abortion, but she decided she wouldn’t do that.
Her Google searches led Perry to Heartbeat International’s Abortion Pill Rescue Network website.
She called the number and spoke to a nurse who told her it was possible that her baby was still alive and could be saved. The nurse connected Perry with a pregnancy resource center about an hour away in Lynchburg, Virginia. When she arrived, the first step was an ultrasound to see whether the baby was still alive.
“We do the ultrasound; she still has a heartbeat,” Perry said of her baby. The medical staff at the pro-life center explained to Perry how the abortion pill reversal works through a 12-week hormone therapy.
Today, Perry’s baby girl, Aubrey, is just over a year old, healthy and “the sweetest little girl you would ever meet,” her mother says.
Editor’s note: This article was published by The Daily Signal and is reprinted with permission. Heartbeat International manages the Abortion Pill Rescue® Network (APRN) and Pregnancy Help News
Actress Jamie Lynn Spears has spoken out again regarding the pressure that was put on her to have an abortion when she was just a teenager. In an episode of “I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here!”, the now 32-year-old actress told her fellow contestants about how it felt to be pregnant at 16, and how the adults around her told her an abortion was her best option.
“When I first got pregnant,” she said through tears, “… They didn’t want me to have the baby.”
Spears was the star of Nickelodeon’s “Zoey 101” when she became pregnant while dating her then-boyfriend Casey Aldridge.
She continued, “After I finished ‘Zoey’, I had the love of my life, what I thought, I decided to keep the baby. I was 16. The whole world was like, ‘You’re a s**t, you’re horrible, your life is over ‘… Because I got pregnant young and I was on a kids’ show.”
She said her parents had a “lot going on” at the time and were “sad” that she was pregnant. “I had to go hide away for a long time because they were relentless.”
Spears moved to Mississippi and “literally hid” she said. “I had paparazzi on me every day, they wouldn’t leave me alone. I just wanted to be normal. I wanted my baby to be normal.”
Spears successfully stood strong against the pressure to have an abortion. Her baby girl, Maddie Briann Aldridge, is now 15 years old, and Spears and her husband Jamie Watson have since welcomed a daughter, Ivey Joan, who is five. Spears recently filmed the sequel film to “Zoey 101” and is a regular on the Netflix series “Sweet Magnolias.” She also recently made her musical debut.
This isn’t the first time Spears has spoken out about the pressure she faced to abort her daughter. In her book, “Things I Should Have Said,” she explained that people from her inner circle “… came to my room trying to convince me that having a baby at this point in my life was a terrible idea… ‘It will kill your career. You are just too young. You don’t know what you’re doing. There are pills you can take. We can help you take care of this problem… I know a doctor.’” She added, “[E]veryone around me just wanted to make this ‘issue’ disappear” and “everyone was certain that termination would be the best course of action.”
She said what mattered most to her family and those in control of her career were her image and her income.
Her sister Britney was also pressured to abort
Like Spears, her sister, singer Britney Spears, also became pregnant unexpectedly when she was dating fellow singer Justin Timberlake. However, when faced with pressure from Timberlake to have an abortion, Britney agreed. She said the pregnancy was a surprise, but for her, “it wasn’t a tragedy.” She said if it had been “left up to me alone, I never would have done it.”
She added, “But Justin definitely wasn’t happy about the pregnancy. He said we weren’t ready to have a baby in our lives, that we were way too young.” Britney underwent the abortion in secret at home, “crying and sobbing until it was all over.”
Of the abortion, she said, “To this day, it’s one of the most agonizing things I have ever experienced in my life.”
Abortion trauma and coercion
The pressure both sisters faced to have an abortion is unfortunately common. Sixty-four percent (64%) of women who have undergone an abortion have said they felt at least some form of pressure to abort — whether that was from the boyfriend or family members, or was due to educational or financial pressures. In addition, a study of women who have sought post-abortion counseling found that nearly 74% of those women felt some form of pressure to have an abortion. This disputes the idea that abortion is about freedom of choice.
Research shows that women who undergo abortions can experience symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. One study found that 20 percent of women struggled with clinical depression after an abortion. A study from the Charlotte Lozier Institute, “Effects of Pressure to Abort on Women’s Emotional Responses and Mental Health,” found that women who reported being pressured into an abortion by either their male partner or a family member reported statistically significant levels of negative emotions surrounding the abortion, interference with daily life, intrusive thoughts, abortion flashbacks, feelings of grief about the abortion, and increased levels of stress when answering questions about their abortion.
By Nancy Flanders | January 9, 2024 LiveAction.org
Live Action has launched a groundbreaking web experience, allowing users to see firsthand how a preborn child develops in the womb, with interactive features through each day of development.
The Window to the Womb web app gives users the ability to truly see into the womb with medically accurate, lifelike time-lapse images. Though there are many apps and websites tracking fetal development, none have ever been presented in this way, or in such detail. Other tools available online only show a handful of images or animations to represent nine months of development in the womb, or even comparisons to items like fruit or household products.
“Window to the Womb” showcases each and every day of development with scientifically accurate, stunning imagery.
As users navigate the web app, they can choose to view a time-lapse of an entire pregnancy, or they can pause and interact with the images and videos, with facts about development available to learn more. Previously, Live Action launched the Baby Olivia initiative, which gave an up-close and powerful look at fetal development — but “Window to the Womb” builds upon this, goes into even greater detail with its day-by-day breakdown and interactive format.
It is a well-known fact that women who are able to view their ultrasounds — and therefore, see firsthand the humanity of their children — are significantly less likely to proceed with an abortion; this is likely why the abortion industry fights so hard to prevent women from seeing their preborn children. Additionally, the abortion industry has been known to lie to women about fetal development. This resource, using creative and innovative technology, will directly combat the lies of the abortion industry and reach pregnant mothers with the truth about the humanity of the children in their wombs.
Update: Britney’s book has been selling out! Pages 74-77 are important about her pregnancy. Some call their unplanned pregnancy an “oops” or a mistake. In the early 2000s the pop star who brought us “Oops! I did it again,” was hiding a painful secret.
She may have looked like a bubbly, happy 19-year-old with a boyband boyfriend posing on the red carpet. But 20-plus years later, after they had broken up, married other people and had children, Britney Spears shared the vulnerable moment she had an abortion.
Media outlets lit up when excerpts from her memoir, “The Woman in Me,” revealed she terminated her pregnancy after boyfriend Justin Timberlake told her he did not want to be a father. She said in the book she did not want to proceed with the abortion, “if it was up to me.”
For reasons unknown beyond the feelings of Timberlake, Spears went through with the process. How many 19-year-olds do we see in our centers with the same scenario?
How many girls come to us as abortion vulnerable or abortion minded because their boyfriend is “not ready” to be a dad? I read a column by a conservative writer after the news broke. He said something along the lines of “as if she couldn’t afford to raise the baby as a single mother making millions of dollars in record sales.”
The writer missed the point.
Spears obviously was not in economic despair.
She simply felt alone.
These young women cling to the men they love and will do anything to keep them close. And sadly, that includes taking the life of their unborn child.
Like most of these situations, Spears and Timberlake parted ways. And Spears was left with a gaping hole of grief.
The pop star was in the spotlight over the years for her mental illness and lashing out in absurd ways such as shaving her head and hitting a car windshield with a baseball bat. Her parents took charge of her life in the form of a conservatorship, likely due to her mental fragility. Thirteen years later she was released from the conservatorship following what came to be known as the “Free Britney” movement.
I must admit I was wondering what happened to her. It seemed to many as though she lost her mind. So many pop stars fall into drug addiction or alcoholism. This wasn’t the case for Spears.
Few people recognize the emotional impact an abortion can present within a woman. Spears just told the world that abortion is “agonizing.”
Finally.
Someone who was bold enough to share the horrors of abortion has spoken out. Will anyone take her seriously? Do people still think she is crazy?
There has been speculation about a music video she made in the early 2000s to her song “Every time.”
In it, she ultimately commits suicide in a bathtub, and she has an outer body experience. She is in a hospital room and there is a woman holding a baby wrapped in pink. The scenes keep panning back to the baby and to the pain in Spears’ eyes.
What if Spears had walked into a pregnancy center all those years ago? What if she met with one of our client advocates?
I’ve seen the Spears/Timberlake scenario play out many times in my office. I recently had a young woman of 19 wanting to go to college and to keep her boyfriend happy. We talked about how she could still complete college with a pregnancy. She believed that was possible. Yet she did not believe the boyfriend would be as supportive. Despite an ultrasound revealing a strong heartbeat, this young woman managed to take the abortion pill.
We are pro-women in our centers. We are here to encourage them and help them to see they can choose life and have a career.
Tweet This: We are pro-women in our pregnancy help centers. We are here to encourage them and help them to see they can choose life and have a career.
Nearly 70% of abortions in the U.S. are coerced, unwanted, or inconsistent with women’s preferences, according to a study released earlier this year by the Charlotte Lozier Institute.
From my experience, I firmly believe 90 percent of these ladies do not want to proceed with an abortion.
Clearly, men have significant impact in a pregnancy decision. We can’t make the father come into the center with her. If they do choose to come, we can show him the ultrasound and offer him assistance as a new father. As centers we need to be praying about our men’s ministry. If a center does not have one, pray to begin one. These young men need our support as well and need to know how they can support their girlfriends when the line pops up on the home pregnancy test.
These “Justins” may not feel ready to be fathers, but we can encourage them through the process as well.
Even if she comes to our centers alone and follows through with the very painful decision like my client and like Spears, we can still offer them hope.
I always tell my clients that no matter what they decide, they can come back. I tell them there will be some grieving at some point. And I offer to lead them through post-abortive counseling.
Imagine if Spears chose life. Who would this young person be today? Imagine if she sought out help after her abortion and received counseling from a center. Imagine if she chose to understand her identity and value.
My heart hurts for her.
Many years of longing for this child have plagued her. We need to show Spears some grace and not condemn her. She is just as precious as the women who walk into our offices every week. If anything, her story could help someone in her very circumstance. Her words boldly written in her memoir and on display in social media could make one more girl consider choosing life over a boyfriend who may not be there next week.
Let’s pray the Lord uses her story. And let’s pray for Spears.
“Free Britney” has just taken on a whole new meaning.
