If you are pregnant right now because you were raped, or if you’ve ever advocated for abortion in the case of rape, I need you to keep reading. I’m about to share the most personal story so far on this website. It may change the rest of your life.
I am about as pro-life as a person can be. I have had hundreds of conversations about abortion, in person and online. And many times, the conversation ends the same way. Someone agrees that abortion takes an innocent life. Then they say something like this: abortion is bad, but it needs to remain available for situations where the mother’s life is at risk or when the mother was raped.
I want to challenge that position. Not with a debate tactic, but with my story.
Before we were married, my wife and I agreed that we wanted adoption to be a part of our story. For the past four years, we have been actively trying to adopt. It has been the most expensive, most heartbreaking, and most love-filled road of our lives. At the beginning of 2026, a friend called us. He said he had recently met a young woman in a difficult situation, and asked if we would be willing to talk with her. Of course we said yes.
It turned out this young woman had been sexually assaulted. As a result, she conceived. A man committed an unthinkable heinous crime against her, which then put her in a position she never asked for or expected to be in. As far as I know, not once did she considered abortion. But you know just as I do that the world has a loud voice. The default position of many people is that if a child is conceived in rape, termination is the right choice. But inside this young woman was an individual human being, with his own DNA, his own blood type, his own fingerprints, and his own heartbeat. His life was the result of someone else’s sin. None of that was his fault, and none of it was hers either.
Our mutual friends stepped in and demonstrated that the world is wrong and that Jesus cares. Thanks to our friends, soon after meeting this young woman, we were officially matched. (That’s a phrase used in the adoption world that means she had officially chosen us to be the adoptive family for her baby.) She later told our friends that she could not imagine a better family for this child.
We walked with her through the whole pregnancy. My wife joined her at the doctor when they learned the baby was a boy. We helped however we could—emotionally, spiritually, and physically—and a real friendship grew between us. Together we chose a name for him, one that fit our family and still honored her heritage. We will just call him JD.
Finally, in June, she went into labor. We drove to the hospital, which was in the next state. My wife stayed with her in the delivery room, and after about twenty hours of hard labor, my wife was the one who got to cut the cord. I was just outside in the hallway, and a few minutes later, I was the one to feed him his first meal.
I do not have words for what happened in those hours. Our hearts simply overflowed. There are voices in the world swirling around and poisoning minds saying that this baby should be dead because of how he was conceived. And yet there we were, eighteen years of dreaming and four years of working finally landing in the same moment, holding this precious gift and sharing joy with the woman who chose life.
Prior to his birth, we had worked out a plan with JD’s birth mother for an open adoption. We were so grateful that she very much wanted to be a part of his life as he grew up in our home. The day after he was born, while we were all still at the hospital, she looked at us and said something I will never forget. “I never knew I was capable of loving someone so much.”
The next day, we were all discharged from the hospital, and we walked out together. Well, JD opted to be pushed in a stroller. It was a beautiful moment. We got in our van with JD, making plans to see the birth mother in just a few weeks. There were tears all around.
To many people, open adoption in this situation puzzles them. Many people assume the kindest action for our birth mother’s own healing would be to walk away and never look at this child’s face again. Remaining a part of his life, apparently, would mean living with a daily reminder of the coward who hurt her. By that logic, she should have been the one most ready to let go, not the one most likely to hold on.
The state where JD was born gives a birth mother five business days to change her mind. Because of a public holiday and because JD was born on a Thursday, that window actually stretched a little longer for JD’s birth mother.
For six days, my wife and I were over the moon to be JD’s parents. For six days, our older boys were thrilled to finally be big brothers together. They were some of the happiest days of our lives.
We waited for a phone call from our attorney saying that all the paperwork was finalized and we could return to our home state with JD. That call never came. Instead, the exact opposite of what any of us expected happened.
The bond between a mother and the child she is carrying is not a theory. It is real, it is physical, and it does not wait for healing to finish before it grows. Every day of that six-day window, JD’s birth mother’s love for him only grew. She did not need distance from him to heal. She needed him.
Despite the fact that his conception was a crime, despite the fact that men who commit this crime often count on abortion to erase the evidence of what they did, despite the fact that she had once believed that healing meant placing him in someone else’s arms and walking away, she could not deny that this child was part of her, and that loving him was part of what she was created for.
The attorney called us. The first words she said were, “This is not a good phone call.” Against all expectations, JD’s birth mother had changed her mind. Within three hours of that phone call, it was official, and the court had the revocation paperwork. Legally, we had to immediately make a plan to return JD to his birth mother’s care. We had him for six days. Love lasts longer than six days. I had never been so devastated.
But I have had some time to reflect.
Hundreds, maybe thousands, of lives have been touched and changed, all because JD’s mother chose life. JD is now in his mother’s care. He will not remember us. But we will never forget him, and neither will the hundreds of people who were praying for him before he ever took a breath. We will spend the rest of our lives praying for his wellbeing, even from a distance.
That’s hard. I won’t pretend it isn’t. But here is what matters more than our broken hearts: JD is alive. He gets to grow up. He gets to change lives himself, and to be a light for Jesus Christ. None of that would be true if his mother had chosen anything other than life. She is a hero.
I want to be clear about two things. First, what we have now walked through is genuinely tragic. I am not glossing over that, and I would not wish this kind of loss on any family. Second, everything I am about to write would still be true even if adoption had never entered this story at all. This is not really a story about adoption. It is a story about whether a human being’s worth depends on how he was conceived.
There were a lot of people surrounding JD’s mother throughout her pregnancy, and there still are. If you are currently facing an unplanned pregnancy, I understand that might not be your situation. You might feel completely alone right now, with no idea who to turn to. I cannot promise you that the people around you will respond the way ours did. But I can tell you this: ending your child’s life will not undo what was done to you. It will not lift the burden you are carrying, and in most cases, it adds to it rather than relieving it. Study after study shows that the emotional weight of abortion tends to land heavier, and stay longer, than anyone expects going in.
Now let me make the case as plainly as I can. Hold up an ultrasound of a child conceived in a loving marriage next to an ultrasound of a child conceived in rape. Which is which? Can you tell the difference? Fast forward nine months. Are you still prepared to end that child’s life because of something his father did?
A man commits a heinous crime. Why would we punish the child for it? The question that matters is not how this child came to exist. The question is what this child is. From the moment of conception, this is a unique person, with his own DNA, his own blood type, developing his own heartbeat, his own fingerprints, and his own mind. People refer to a fetus (which, in Latin, means offspring or child) as a “clump of cells.” You and I are also a clump of cells. What’s your point? Also, just like you and me, he is a person.
I want to be fair to the hard case here. Rape raises real and serious questions about trauma and support for the mother, and those questions deserve real answers. But they are not the same question as whether the child growing inside her is a human being worth protecting. Those are two different questions, and we should not let one quietly answer the other.
Some people will tell you this is not really about whether the child is a person. It is about whether anyone can force a woman’s body to sustain a pregnancy she never agreed to. I understand why that question feels different. But notice what it is actually asking. It is not asking whether you can refuse to start something. It is asking whether you can end the life of someone who already exists and is already depending on you. We do not allow that anywhere else. A parent can refuse to donate a kidney to their own child. But no parent is allowed to end that child’s life because caring for him became too costly. The right to walk away from a burden is not the same thing as the right to kill the person attached to the burden.
Here is the inconsistency I want to call to your attention. If abortion is wrong because it ends an innocent human life, then making an exception for rape means the real reason was never about the child’s humanity at all. It was about the circumstances of his conception. And the value of a human life has never come from the circumstances of how he or she was conceived.
The rape was a grave injustice. Ending the life of the child does not undo that injustice. It adds a second one. Rape is a crime, and the woman who suffers it deserves every bit of support, protection, and justice we can offer her. But the child is innocent. The man who committed the crime is the one who should be punished. Not the child.
If you are carrying your rapist’s child right now, please choose life. I can promise you there are families out there, right now, who have been waiting years for a phone call telling them they have been matched with a birth mother who chose life for her child. I also expect that you, just like our birth mother did, are underestimating the bond you will feel with this child once he or she is born.
There is an account in Genesis about a man named Joseph, sold into slavery by his own brothers. Years later, after God had used that very evil to save an entire nation, Joseph said this to the brothers who had wronged him:
But as for you, you meant evil against me; but God meant it for good, in order to bring it about as it is this day, to save many people alive.
Genesis 50:20
If you’re in this situation, what was done to you was evil. Full stop. But evil does not get the final word over your child’s life, and it does not get the final word over yours either. Paul wrote to the church in Rome:
We know that all things work together for good to those who love God, to those who are the called according to His purpose.
Romans 8:28
Not just the easy things or the religious things. All things, including this.
JD’s mother is raising him now, despite the worst possible beginning he could have had, and he gets to grow up wanted. That is a small picture of something much bigger. Scripture says:
Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ, just as He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blame before Him in love, having predestined us to adoption as sons by Jesus Christ to Himself, according to the good pleasure of His will, to the praise of the glory of His grace, by which He made us accepted in the Beloved.
Ephesians 1:3–6
To those who are in Christ, let me remind all of us: None of us came to Him clean. He adopted us anyway, in spite of everything true about where we came from, because our worth to Him was never about our origin. It was about the fact that He loves us. He adopted us “according to the good pleasure of His will,” and “He made us accepted in the Beloved.”
If reading this gave you a different way to see this question, I would love for you to be part of what we are building at Topical Bible Studies, where we try to bring Scripture to bear on the hardest questions we face. Most of them are doctrinal and aren’t as emotional as this one. But if you are facing this decision right now, please reach out. We would be happy to help you how we can, pointing you to resources and communities you might not even know exist. We want to help.
Choose life.