Come into the Light

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Leslie Basham: Women who choose abortion are affected for life, and so are men. Jason Jones remembers a call he got from his girlfriend.

Jason Jones: As she was crying, it was like her soul was crying. It haunted me, the sound of that—every day. She just kept saying over and over again, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. It wasn’t me.”

Then I heard her father over the other line say, “Jason, we know your secret. Your secret is gone. You can come home now.”

He had beaten her up and had taken her to get an abortion.

I promised her on the phone that day—I said, “If it takes me the rest of my life, I’m going to end abortion.”

Leslie: This is Revive Our Hearts with Nancy Leigh DeMoss for Monday, January 20.

Nancy Leigh DeMoss: As you know, our mission here at Revive Our Hearts is to call women to experience freedom and fullness and fruitfulness in Christ. The first part of that is freedom. We know that it’s the truth that sets us free, but the enemy works relentlessly to get us to believe lies that will put us in bondage.

One of the most common areas in our culture where the enemy has planted many, many lies and has caused people to believe those lies is in the area of abortion and life issues. Today we have the privilege of talking with three people who have been impacted by the whole issue of abortion in different ways. They’re going to share with us how abortion has touched their lives, but also what some of the lies are and what is the truth that dispels those lies and confronts those lies.

Let me introduce them to you, and then I want you to hear their stories. We won’t get this all in one day’s program, but over the next few days we’ll be listening to parts of their stories. As we listen, I really believe that God is going to speak to the lives of many of our listeners who have been touched by abortion in different ways, perhaps even in ways you don’t even realize.

You say, “I’ve never had an abortion. This program is not for me.”

This program is for you because your life is being touched by it. It’s all over our culture. It’s in the churches to far greater extents than we realize. That’s why we’re taking these days to address this issue head on, but also wanting to point people to the truth and the freedom that we can find in Jesus Christ.

Seated to my left around this table—and let me just say, we’re in a hotel room, four of us, recording. We’re at a conference. So we may have some audio issues here. We’ve had points along the way here—some vacuum cleaners going and some different types of sound that we don’t normally have in the studio. We have a make-shift studio here. But we’re so grateful to have these three guests with us here today to talk about this very important issue.

Kelly Roy—Kelly, you’re from New Hampshire and a woman, let’s say, twenty-something. We’re so grateful to have you, as a younger woman, talking about this issue and speaking to college-aged women. Welcome to Revive Our Hearts and thanks for coming and joining us today.

Kelly Roy: Thank you very much for having me. It’s an honor.

Nancy: Kelly, you have two children, a daughter and a son.

Kelly: I do.

Nancy: You’re going to tell us a bit about the story of how abortion has affected your life. But before you do, let me introduce Rebecca Porter.

You live in Florida now. Rebecca, thank you for being willing to tell what I know is a very difficult story, but it’s a story of God’s redemption as well. Welcome to Revive Our Hearts.

Rebecca Porter: Thank you. It’s an honor to be here.

Nancy: When we’ve talked about the issue of abortion, I think in the past the guests we’ve had have always been females. But today we’re joined by a man on the panel.

I’m so grateful, Jason Jones, that you would be willing to join us. The two women around the table are silently applauding here because, Jason, you have a story about how abortion affects men as well. So thank you for joining us here on Revive Our Hearts.

Jason: Thank you for having me, Nancy.

Nancy: I asked you a little bit ago before we started recording what you do, Jason, and I’m not smart enough to explain all the things that you do. Somebody said you’re a spiritual multi-tasker, you do a lot of things. But the thing that really struck me was the one phrase where you said you devoted your life to trying to end abortion.

Jason: Yes.

Nancy: Why?

Jason: Well, it wasn’t a choice. I didn’t wake up when I was seventeen years old and go and meet with my career counselor and she said, “Do you know, Jason, I think you’d be a good pro-life activist.”

That’s really what I consider myself, although I work in media and in politics and with non-profits.

When I was seventeen years old—actually the weekend before my seventeenth birthday, my girlfriend came over to my house on a Saturday morning and woke me up. She was crying. I remember looking down at her, and she was just holding me and crying. The first words out of her mouth were, “I’m pregnant.”

My response—I don’t know if it was rational. Sometimes I wish this wasn’t my response. But I remember just being happy. Sometimes I think that makes it difficult with me to share with other men. But it’s just really how I felt.

I was happy. I could tell she saw that because instantly her crying turned to laughter. I think she was afraid that I would be angry or something. We just sat there, and we spent the morning trying to figure out how we would solve our problem and/or opportunity or blessing.

Nancy: You were not a believer at the time?

Jason: I wasn’t. I was actually raised in an anti-religious household. My grandfather was really the dominant factor in my childhood and in my family. He was a Scientologist from early on, from the fifties on.

Nancy: So your response was not based on any kind of Christian perspective?

Jason: No, I think just a natural response. I was always a very bad student, and I didn’t pay attention. Planned Parenthood came to my public school in a health class and tried to indoctrinate me. I was probably spacing out, just like I did in Algebra class. I don’t know. I was happy, which I think is a perfectly natural response to a child coming into this world, regardless of the circumstance. Although sometimes, like in my situation, it was a difficult situation.

I had a friend who had just dropped out of high school and had joined the army, and I was turning seventeen in a week. So that was the plan. I would drop out of high school, join the army, and she would wear baggy sweaters and take vitamins until I got back from basic training. Then together we would go to her father.

Her father was someone I really looked up to. He’s a very successful man, a very well-known public man, and he was very religious. Their family had stability and order that I didn’t have in my family. But we were afraid to tell him. I thought, naively, (I guess from watching too many movies) I would come back in an Army uniform and say, “I’m here to take care of you daughter now,” as an E-1 private in the army.

So that’s what I did. I joined the Army. A few weeks after meeting with the recruiter, I was in the reception center and off to Fort Benning, Georgia. How silly our society is—I still had my Scooby-Doo blankets and pillowcase. I didn’t own a suitcase, so I turned my Scooby-Doo pillowcase inside out, put my toiletries and socks in the bag, and off I went to Fort Benning, Georgia.

My girlfriend and I were very excited. Weeks went by, week after week, and she’d write me letter after letter. It was on a Sunday two weeks before I was to get out, six months after my daughter Jessica was conceived (we’d named her Jessica). I was cleaning pots and pans. I didn’t go to church, and so on Sundays I would get the worst detail while everyone else was off at church. A friend of mine came running into the kitchen and told me that my girlfriend was on the phone. I said, “Can you ask her to call back next week? It’s not my week for calls.”

He said, “Well, she’s crying.”

So I ran out and I answered the phone. She was crying, but it was like her soul was crying. It’s haunted me, the sound of that—every day. She just kept saying over and over again, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. It wasn’t me.”

Then I heard her father over the other line say, “Jason, we know your secret. Your secret is gone. You can come home now.”

He had beaten her up and had taken her to get an abortion. As soon as her father said that, a drill sergeant reached over my shoulder and hung up the phone. I decked the drill sergeant. I was crying . . .

Nancy: Hit him?

Jason: I punched the drill sergeant. That began a very violent period in my life, after the abortion. That wasn’t characteristic of my behavior. I punched the drill sergeant, started crying, saying, “Send me home. They killed my baby.”

My captain came over. I wish I could meet this man to this day, because I suspect he was an extremely devout Christian. He came over. He saw me crying. I just kept saying, “How could they kill my baby? They killed my baby!”

He grabbed me. He pulled me into his office. He said, “I didn’t even know you had a child.”

I said, “Yes, my girlfriend was pregnant and her father said that he killed the baby, the baby is gone.”

He said, “You mean she had an abortion?”

Because I was saying, “Call the police!” I really did not know abortion was legal. Nancy, that sounds strange. I just—it was something unfathomable to me. I don’t know how I missed it—it was 1989—but I just did.

He sat me down. He explained to me this was called abortion; it happens all the time, and it’s legal. He gave me a roll of quarters, and he told me to go call my girlfriend.

Nancy: But in your mind, this was a baby that had been killed?

Jason: It was a baby. It’s natural. It’s a baby. It takes indoctrination and slick marketing campaigns to make someone think that a child in a womb is not a baby.

Nancy: Even though you had not had a Christian background?

Jason: Not at all. In fact, I didn’t like Christians. I grew up making fun of Christians. My grandfather was a Scientologist.

Nancy: But in your heart, you knew.

Jason: I knew it was a baby. Even pagans love their own children. I loved our country. I remember walking from my barracks to the PX, because my captain gave me a roll of quarters. He didn’t want me distracting the entire battalion. He gave me a roll of quarters, and he said, “Get out of here. Go to the PX and call her. If you want to go home, go out of the army, I’ll let you out.”

Of course, I stayed in. But I remember walking from the barracks with this roll of quarters to a payphone and really being shocked that my country could do such a thing. It baffled me. The only experience I could compare it to was—I was born in 1971, just on the other side of the civil rights movement. I remember the first time I saw police officers with hoses blasting young students, and crowds of people throwing rocks at young girls.

Nancy: You probably couldn’t believe that it had ever happened.

Jason: Yes. It was just ten years before I was born, but I just couldn’t believe it. It was that same sick feeling that “this is my country?” Then I just really thought “no one knows.” I called my girlfriend, and I promised her on the phone that day. I said, “If it takes me the rest of my life, I’m going to end abortion.” A naïve promise.

Nancy: You were seventeen years old.

Jason: A seventeen-year-old high school dropout from the south side of Chicago.

I didn’t know—there was no Internet. So when I talk to young people today I say, now imagine this: I get out of basic training and go to my duty station in Hawaii. It’s my goal to end abortion. I don’t know there are pro-life groups. I was sort of going door-to-door. In my off time, this Howlie boy—that’s what they call white people in Hawaii—with the shaved head—GI—in my free time I would just go door-to-door in the local neighborhoods, knocking on doors on weekends, saying, “Can I talk to you about abortion?”

Nancy: Wow.

Jason: I would meet folks, and then I’d give them the phone number of my CQ desk, because we didn’t have pagers or cell phones then. So there was a payphone on the third floor of my barracks at Scofield, a CQ desk. Once a lady from Hawaii Right to Live called and left a message for me. I called her, and she said, “Why are you going around telling people that you represent Hawaii Right to Life?” I said, “What’s Hawaii Right to Life? What is that?”

“We’re a pro-life organization. You’re going around knocking on doors.”

I said, “I didn’t even know that you existed. I’m glad to know you’re out there.” That’s how I entered the pro-life movement. But I wasn’t a Christian for the first fourteen years in the pro-life movement, I was a dedicated atheist. The novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand really influenced my worldview. I founded the Ayn Rand Club on my college campus and the pro-life student union, which seems odd.

Nancy: There’s probably only one of you on the planet, I’m thinking.

Jason: Probably. I hear that a lot. That’s probably a good thing, Nancy. From there, that’s how it began. Step by step, by the grace of God, I’m a Christian now. If you make a commitment to the Lord and you step out, He’ll be there. God uses dodos. He uses people that are too dumb to know it can’t be done, and He’ll be there every step of the way, making it possible. Now I know several babies by name, through the grace of God, that He used me to talk to their mothers and befriend their fathers. So I thank God that from my loss I can see the fruit.

Nancy: I thank God there are people like you and the other two women who are joining us here today who have this courageous, tenacious commitment to do something that, humanly speaking, I think you know, is not possible.

Jason: Right.

Nancy: That is, to end abortion. But thank God, He deals not in the realm of the natural, but in the realm of the supernatural.

Kelly, you came out of a very different background than Jason.

Kelly: I did.

Nancy: You grew up in a believing home.

Kelly: I did. I got saved at seven years old and grew up in the same church. When I became a teenager, I walked away. I learned after I came back that really I was trying to have a relationship with God through other people and not—“you pray for me.” It just didn’t work, and I just walked away.

Nancy: Walked away from the Lord?

Kelly: From the Lord, yes.

Nancy: Were you acting out that rebellion?

Kelly: Yes, I think so. I think that there’s a time when you come to a place where only God can fill certain things in your heart, and you don’t realize that. So you try to have other people fill them. So I began dating behind my parents' back really, because I wasn’t allowed to date. I got pregnant with my daughter at the age of eighteen. I was a senior. It was the summer before my senior year, and I said, “I’m going to finish my senior year. I’m going to graduate on time and go on to college. “

The alone feeling of getting pregnant—it was hard. I told my parents, and it was hard—it was hard for them. But they were still supportive. Abortion never, never even entered my mind. I knew I was pro-life. I grew up that way. When I think about it, I walked around and it was like, "Yes, that’s not right. That’s wrong." It wasn’t something, as now, I am so conscious about it and what’s going on. I was not like that at that time, but I knew it was wrong. I somewhat came back.

I started to go back to church sparingly but still was not pursuing that intimate relationship with Christ. Boys came back into the picture, and I began dating again. When I found myself pregnant for the second time, I wasn’t living at home.

I was going to buy a home with the boy I was dating. God really put His foot in the middle of that situation. So I ended up living with other relatives at the time. That was when I began to receive pressure. “We don’t want to do this. We’re young.”

Nancy: Pressure from your boyfriend?

Kelly: Yes. I don’t even remember the words that were spoken to me. I just remember it was pressure. The only words I remember spoken to me were, my aunt turned to me and said—we were sitting in the garage in their home, just the two of us talking. She said to me, “Your parents forgave you the first time you got pregnant. Do you really think they’re going to be able to forgive you again?”

All of a sudden I became really seized with fear. "Oh my, am I going to be forgiven?" When I really think about it now, it was almost like, "Is God going to forgive me, too?" Because your parents are really such a representative of that. My parents meant a lot to me. During this time, I didn’t really know until later, they had just been praying and praying for me.

Nancy: Because you were the prodigal daughter?

Kelly: I was the prodigal daughter.

Nancy: Had they been talking to you?

Kelly: In ways they were. I don’t remember. It’s kind of like during that time period I just had a film and was not listening right then.

Nancy: You didn’t have ears to hear.

Kelly: I didn’t. I remember crying and praying when I was pregnant. I actually prayed that I would miscarry, because I did not want to go through with the abortion. I did not want to take that step and say, “I’m going to kill this baby.”

Nancy: Did someone say to you, you should get an abortion?

Kelly: Yes. That was what was suggested to me. I just cried and wept, I remember crying a lot.

Nancy: From your boyfriend?

Kelly: Yes. I made the appointment. Actually, I called my OB-GYN. To this day I thank them, even though I had the abortion. I called them and asked them and they said, “We do not perform those, nor do we recommend them or suggest anybody.”

Nancy: So God was giving you . . .

Kelly: That should have been like “hello,” a sign. But I looked it up in the phone book, and I went to a place in the capital of our state. I went to the appointment. We were in there, and it’s just a very cold place. You can’t—as much as they may try, you can’t warm that up. I remember doing paper work and sitting there nervous and shaking. They made sure that I was at least eight weeks pregnant. They said, “We don’t do them unless you’re at least eight weeks pregnant.”

I was about nine-and-a-half to ten weeks. They figured it out the same way they figure it out in an OB-GYN office. That’s how far along you are. So they did blood work and they verified that. I was about nine-and-a-half to ten weeks. I remember going into this room to be counseled and then watching this video. I remember sitting there crying, and I didn’t want to do it. I remember sitting there and no concern was mentioned about why I was upset. I was counseled into it, is what I say. They say it’s counseling, but it’s really, “You’re doing the right thing. You’re young. You already have one child. You’re in college.”

So I remember I went up, and I had changed. I was sitting in this room, and I was crying. I was asking God to help me. It was like, all of a sudden, everything just shut off. I felt absolutely nothing. For a long time I thought it was that my conscience was seared. That’s what I thought it was, until God really just showed me later, "No, you just completely shut down emotionally. You could not handle what was about to happen." And I couldn’t.

They told me the procedure was just mild cramping; it would be over soon. It was extremely painful. It was extremely traumatic. I know that it traumatized my boyfriend. I know to this day it did. He hasn’t said that, but I know.

I never met the abortion doctor, if she was that. She came into the room, did the procedure, and left. Maybe said two or three words. I really don’t remember. I just remember laying on the table crying and being in pain. That’s what I remember. I went to the recovery room, and then they give me a prescription and they send me home.

Two days later I was at home by myself and I was cramping badly, and I went into the bathroom. As there’s no polite way to say this, I felt as though I had passed something. When I went and looked, in my hand was my baby, all in one piece. It was like everything happened in such a quick period of time.

I remember the skin being translucent and saw where the eyes were and where the hands and the feet were. I was horrified, absolutely horrified at what I had seen. I ran to the phone and called the abortion facility back. All they said to me was, “That’s too bad,” and hung up on me. All I remember is that I shut down emotionally.

I functioned just to physically take care of the daughter that I had. I was not there for her emotionally or spiritually at all. I couldn’t be. I dropped out of school. I stopped eating. I lost a lot of weight. It wasn’t until I began to have stomach problems to where I would get such pain in my stomach—that’s where a lot of women hold their stress. I was just shoving it and shoving it and shoving it down and trying not to deal with it. It’s like a beach ball. You try to push it into the water, and it’s going to pop up some place else. It doesn’t go away.

My parents sat me down and said, “We really feel that this is something emotional or something spiritual. We don’t think it’s just a physical problem that you’re having.” I would pass out. I would have to go to the hospital because it was so painful. When they said that to me, something broke, and I started weeping uncontrollably. I couldn’t even speak.

Really, it was the Lord that spoke to my mom. My mom said, “Oh Kelly, did you have an abortion?” I sobbed and sobbed and sobbed and sobbed. It was then that I began to get healing, because I had repented. I was able to stop—I wasn’t really able to stop crying, but I was able to pray and just repent. I just started weeping and saying, “God, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.” I didn’t realize later until I counted it out, but that was exactly nine months after I had the abortion. I repented and began my journey of healing.

Nancy: I know that for you and for women who have been through this process, healing doesn’t come overnight. But I think it’s important that we just remember that, whether you come out of the Christian background that you did or a totally pagan background, once you come to face the issue, to face yourself, to face the Lord, that you do have to come out into the light. We have listeners today who still have not come into the light and have not been willing to just acknowledge what they’ve done. That’s where you find grace, not in the secrecy, not in the hiding, but in the honesty.

Kelly: That’s right.

Nancy: Kelly, I want to hear more about your healing process and Jason, more about what you’ve learned as you have been tirelessly advocating on behalf of the unborn. But we have another person sitting here with us today, and we want to hear her story. We’re going to pick up with Rebecca Porter’s story when we come back to Revive Our Hearts tomorrow.

Leslie: This week we mark the anniversary of the Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade. So Nancy’s been sharing some stories of the way abortion affects women and men in real life.  

We heard from Jason Jones and Kelly Roy. That conversation is part of a three-day series called “Fighting For Life.”  

If you know someone who would benefit from today’s program, you can send them a link to the transcript or the audio by visiting ReviveOurHearts.com. 

We’re able to bring you programs like this one thanks to the prayer support and the financial support of our listeners. When you help make Revive Our Hearts possible with a gift of any size, we’ll say thanks by sending the new piano CD from Nancy Leigh DeMoss called Be Still. Ask for Be Still when you call 1–800–569–5959, or visit ReviveOurHearts.com.

Tomorrow we’ll hear from a guest who had to deal with a strange mix of emotions after her husband died and she realized she was carrying his child.

Rebecca: So I went to the doctor and he said, "Yes, you're pregnant." I was in shock. My husband had died a month prior to this. They said, "Do you know how far along you are?"

I said, "I have no idea."

They said, "You can come back and the doctor will give you a pelvic.

I agreed. I remember he said it was was sixteen weeks, and I just started crying. Then he said to me, "Well, we normally don't do the procedure that far along."

I said, "Excuse me? I don't know what you are talking about."

He said, "We normally don't do the procedure . . ."

I had no clue that I was actually in an abortion clinic.

Leslie: Hear more tomorrow on Revive Our Hearts.

Revive Our Hearts with Nancy Leigh DeMoss is an outreach of Life Action Ministries.