Experiencing the Love and Grace of God after Abortion

Dannah Gresh: Years ago Portia Collins made a choice that she now regrets deeply. The day came when she opened up to her mom about that wrong decision. And rather than being judged, Portia experienced true grace.

Portia Collins: My mom's love didn't change for me. So my mom was really a vision of what we experience in Christ. I wish I had experienced that as I was making that decision.

Dannah: This is the Revive Our Hearts podcast with Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth, author of Adorned, for January 22, 2026. I’m Dannah Gresh.

It was on this day in 1973 that it became legal here in the United States to take the life of an unborn child in all fifty states, at any stage of pregnancy. And even though the Roe v. Wade decision was overturned in 2022, abortion is still readily available. Maybe it’s a painful part of your story. 

Many women have suffered from a guilty conscience because of a past abortion. They know there’s forgiveness in Jesus. They trust He’s paid for their sins. But still they carry a sense of shame and damage with them everywhere they go. 

Our guest today, Portia Collins, understands that. She’s experienced it. We’ll hear from her in just a moment. But first, let’s hear from Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth, unpacking this concept of shame a little bit.

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth: As the Lord would have it, I got a call the other day from a sweet friend of mine who is involved in leading women—women coming out of prison who've dealt with substance and addiction issues, all kinds of issues 

The women she's dealing with get this and my friend gets it. She's been there. She talked about some of the residents. They have one as a woman in her forties who when she was five or six years old, her dad would put her on a table in a room full of men and spin her around.

Whichever one she landed on would get her for the night. Decades later it still affects that woman's identity. That woman doesn't have any memory—ever—of sexual purity. There’s another woman there who's a younger woman, a baby Christian. 

She's always been sexually active. Men, women, it didn't matter. She had no idea that homosexuality was wrong. She just has always been sexually involved; it didn't matter who it was. And she felt free as long as she was doing that. 

Now she has become a Christian. Now she's got temptation she's dealing with. It's harder now in a way. It wasn't as hard before because she was just giving into it. Now she's fighting a battle with who she is in Christ. But that old temptation comes in. “Sometimes,” my friend was saying to me, “Just the temptation itself can bring up all the shame.”

My friend said, “The biggest challenge for these women”—I think it's true for all of us—“is to redirect their thinking, to help them understand you don't have to think that way anymore. Your identity is who you are in Christ now—righteous, holy, a follower of Christ.” 

She said, “What I have to do is get these women to renew their mind with the Word of God, to put on the mind of Christ.” She says, “Some days, a lot of times they don't know how to do this. So you sit down with them, you pull out your Bible, and you say, ‘Here, read this. What does that say? Who are you now? Not who were you, but what's your new identity?'’ 

She said, “First you have to deal with the guilt. Believe you're forgiven. But,” she said, and I thought this was interesting, “sometimes shame is even harder to deal with than guilt.” She was talking out of some of her own experience too. 

She said, “Shame can linger. It's embarrassing. It's almost paralyzing. It makes you feel like you can't go forward. It makes you feel like you're in prison. It's captivating. But,” she said, “I have to help these women understand,” what she has learned herself, “to go on living in shame is to say God can't redeem this brokenness.” But He can! He does! He will! And this is what He came to redeem.” 

So she said to me, “These women have to get a right view of God and as they experience His unconditional love and forgiveness and develop a relationship with Him, that will change how they view themselves. They'll realize that God's not mad at them. He doesn't see them as dirty and broken. He came, He sent His Son to redeem that brokenness.”

Dannah: That’s Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth, explaining how you and I as believers in Jesus can avoid defining ourselves by shame. She’ll be back with more, later.

Portia Collins knew shame first hand. On yesterday’s edition of Revive Our Hearts she shared how a choice she made in college—the choice to end her unborn baby’s life—brought a crippling feeling of shame. She understood the grace of God. But experientially, she felt what Nancy was just describing. Dirty and broken. 

If you missed that episode, you can catch up by listening on the Revive Our Hearts app, or at ReviveOurHearts.com. Portia is on staff here at Revive Our Hearts. Let’s listen to the second part of my conversation with her.

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I don't have abortion in my past but I have sexual sin in my past. Everything you're describing about the shame and the hiding, I knew that pain. It did not stop until I told someone. And that was the day when my story started to shift and change. 

When did that day happen for you, when you really found someone that you could tell and it wasn't just “Hey, I'm telling you this in case something happens to me.” But it was, “I'm telling you this because I'm ready to pursue the healing of Jesus.” When did that happen for you?

Portia: It was probably honestly about three or four years ago, Dannah, when I began to speak openly and honestly. What led me there was, I read a study from another ministry that said that seven in ten women who have had abortions would call themselves Christians.

So there are women in the pews who have had abortions. Why are we not talking about this in our churches? It’s like this thing that we tuck away and nobody talks about and the cycle continues to go on and on and on.

And then it dawned on me, it’s because the enemy thrives in our silence. He would love nothing more than for women to remain silent about this, to suffer. And when I say, “suffer in silence” I mean to carry that shame and that guilt, carrying the weight of unworthiness. He wants that.

And he also wants women who may even be considering abortion to feel as if—or to believe the lie—that there is no one they can tell or that there is nowhere that they can go. And so, my heart has really been to just open up my mouth, even if it hurts, even if I’m in tears, even if I’m afraid.

The testimony of my life—and even how God has so beautifully redeemed my life—and how He has been so gracious to me, in spite of my sin. I am a poster child for the gospel! Remember, I said whenever I made this decision, I felt like I was done.

And that’s partially because I had such a legalist mindset that I thought, There is no way that I’m going to be able to dig my way out of this hole! When in fact, yeah, I could dig my way out . . . .Jesus reached down, and He pulled me out of that hole!

I’m reminded in Scripture where it speaks in 2 Corinthians 5:17: “If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creature. The old has passed away.” That means that we can use our voices to still women who are facing this decision, to show them, to disciple them, to walk alongside them, and say, “Hey, you don’t have to make this decision! You can walk a different way!”

Dannah: You know, I really want to go back to what you said, that it was just three or four years ago that you started to really get the courage to tell your story. I want to go to that day, that place, that room, where you got the courage and you said it for the first time. Was it with one person, was it with a group of people? What happened? Take us there.

Portia: So, it was actually on a podcast interview!

Dannah: Go big, or go home, Portia!

Portia: I know, that’s what I said. It’s so crazy, Dannah, because the podcast was basically recounting that moment when your life changed. I felt the Lord leading me to talk about this. And in my mind I was like, “Oh, no! We’re not doing this here, like right now! Like, no!” 

And I remember I had to tell them, “Let’s pause for a minute, because I just need a minute.” I was like crying, because I was not going to talk about this on a podcast, on a public platform.

Dannah: Did your husband know?

Portia: Yes, my husband knew, actually when we first started dating. That is one of the first things that I said to him. And I’m not going to say it was . . . this, too, was still fear. I wanted him to make the decision if he wanted to be with me or not, if he wanted to pursue anything further.

Dannah: You were still struggling with that unworthiness, that shame.

Portia: Yes. So I didn’t tell him because we were just chatting. I can’t even say that I was sharing from my understanding my redemption. It was more like, “Hey, I’ve got this really ugly part of my past.”

Dannah: Did your mom know when you were sitting there at that podcast, crying, wondering?

Portia: Yes, my Mom did know. By that time I had told her. The way that I told my mom was, we were observing a situation with someone else who had also recently made the decision to have an abortion. And it was time. “Well, Mom, I made that decision, too.”

Dannah: What was it like to tell her?

Portia: I should have told her from the jump, when I was pregnant, honestly. I wish I had gone to my mom first. But because I feared that my mom was the kind of believer, I say “believer” loosely, let’s just say, the kind of “Christian”. . . I saw my mom through a jaded lens of experiences that I had had with other people or other moms. I saw how they were with their daughters, and I thought, That’s exactly how my mom is going to be with me. And . . . my momma wasn’t!

Dannah: What was she like? What did she say that was helpful that day you told her?

Portia: Just filled with grace! You know, of course, she expressed that she wished that I had come to her. But the thing is, my mom's love didn't change for me. I realized in that moment when I told her that my mom’s love wasn’t going to change for me. 

And so, my mom was really a vision of what we experience in Christ. I wish I had experienced that as I was making that decision. Because I can say by the time my mom found out, it was years later.

Dannah: So she was Christ to you. She was Christ in the flesh, the hands and the feet and the voice of Christ. It reminds me of that passage in Romans 8 that says, “Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or [danger], or sword? . . . [No], in all . . . things we are more than conquerors through him [who] loved us” (Rom. 8:35, 37 KJV, emphasis added). And there’s not death nor life nor angels nor rulers nor things present nor things to come nor powers nor height nor depth nor anything else in all creation that has the power to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord! (see v. 38–39).

Those are the words of Scripture (a little bit of Dannah paraphrase in there), and that’s what you experienced when you told your mom! That’s why we’re saying, “Tell someone!”

Portia: Yes, 100 percent!

Dannah: Otherwise we risk distorting what Christ is thinking and feeling towards us, when nothing can cancel His love. 

So you’d had those experiences—telling your husband, telling your mom, you’d been in the Word, you’d been growing in the Word. You’re sitting in the seat with a mic in front of you, and you feel the Holy Spirit prompting you. You step back, tears in your eyes. What made you say something?

Portia [takes a deep breath]: Because I had to speak honestly about the goodness of God in my life. And what I mean by that is, I felt like it would have been a false representation to share my life as a believer and all the things that God had done in my life, and the ways that He was growing and maturing me. It would have been a false representation of His love and the depth of His love and the breadth of His love to not speak about my abortion, not to not speak about just where He brought me from. 

And here’s the thing, Dannah: because my mom and my grandmom reared me in the faith . . . In fact, I’ve always been known as a “church girl,” because they were the church pianist and organist. I was always at church. I did a lot of “church-y” things. And so it was as if God was speaking to me and showing me, “Tell the truth so that the work that I’ve done in your life is not attributed to ‘religiosity,’ but it is truly attributed to grace!” 

And so, that’s why I opened my mouth. I didn’t have a choice, Dannah! But after I did, I could see why. I was so scared—trembling, literally shaking. But afterward, it was if—truly—a weight, a burden, had just lifted from me!

Even though I had told my mom and I had told my husband and a few other people, to be able to stand boldly and say, “This is where God has redeemed me from,” it was as if someone had just pulled a thousand pounds of me!

Because now the very thing, the very weapon that Satan had been using against me in my mind . . . As I’m still growing, pursuing Christ, Satan was still using this thing against me, even as I was parenting. 

At this time I had Emmy, and I was like anytime Emmy got sick, I was thinking in my mind, I’d be struggling, “Oh she’s sick because you know that decision you made,” or “This has happened because of that decision.”

And so it was as if the enemy lost his power and God got His glory, by me opening my mouth and speaking truthfully about that.

Dannah: I’m interested in knowing how people responded. I remember when that happened. We were friends at that time, we were just getting to know each other and just starting to work together. Did you experience what you feared, which was judgment? Or did you experience something different from the body of Christ once you started to share this testimony?

Portia: I experienced something different, and that was love. And even those who I think would have potentially leaned toward judgment in the past, something changed. How do I say this? Some people in my life, that I had known what their response would be, or I had seen it play out and felt like what I saw in my own experience, they responded differently. I think it is because of the way that God used my own testimony. 

I mean, I think what they really saw was, “Oh my goodness! God’s grace is this deep and this wide! Portia isn’t walking this walk because she’s Debby do-gooder Christian. It’s because of the grace of God!”

I feel that the way God used my experience was a bit of an encouragement or testament to those in my life, even those who I assumed would respond judgmentally based on past actions. 

I feel like God just showed me that ultimately He is sovereign over all, and He turns the hearts of man, and He molds us and He shapes us. This is a testament of God’s grace, too, because God made sure that I was just encamped with love and grace and hope and encouragement to walk forward!

He also is bringing other women in my life who had experienced the same, and had been suffering in silence, dealing with fear, guilt, and shame for so many years! I’m talking about women, some of which were ten, twenty years older than me, Dannah. They would come and say, “I've been carrying this for so long, and I heard this podcast, and now I'm speaking more openly about my experiences. I'm able to talk with my daughters and my granddaughters.”

And so yeah, the Lord was so kind to make sure that what I heard and I saw and I felt on the heels of opening up my mouth about this reflected who He was. And that is, He is a God of grace and love and redemption.

Dannah: So good!

Again, that is my dear friend Portia Collins, pointing us to Jesus. Abortion in your past might make you feel like you’re in bondage to shame, but God can make something beautiful out of what’s ugly and painful!

Nancy addressed this in a series she recorded about the so-called “sinner woman” in Luke chapter 7. You see, Jesus was eating at the home of Simon the Pharisee. A woman who was known to everyone to be morally impure interrupted their dinner. 

She wept and poured perfume on Jesus’ feet. Jesus knew the judgmental thoughts of Simon, so He told him a story about two individuals who were in debt. One owed a small amount, the other a much larger amount. Both debts were forgiven. And Jesus’ question to Simon was, “Who loves more?” Here’s Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth.

Nancy: Jesus went to Simon's house to redeem two sinners—Simon the Pharisee and the sinner woman. Which do you relate to the most? The sinner woman? If so, you may be tempted to find your identity in your many sins, what you have done. 

Do you relate to the Pharisee more? If so, you may be tempted to find your identity in what you haven't done, in your goodness. And of the two, this is probably the more dangerous! The sinner woman is more likely to respond to the gospel before the Pharisee, because the Pharisee thinks, “I don't need this!”

And they need to be reminded, we need to be reminded: “there is none good. No, not one!” (Psalm 14:3). Over the last few weeks as I've been working on this series, I've been in communication with a woman who's been dealing with some deeply painful stuff in her past. 

It involves having been sinned against in some enormous ways by men that she should have been able to trust. It also led to some sinful responses and patterns on her part. She has confessed those. She's repented of that sin, though the men involved have never acknowledged their sin. But this woman has continued to struggle with lingering shame.

I've watched her choose the pathway of repentance over the course of a couple of years. I've been eager for her to be free from the burden of shame, to be able to walk in the full grace and freedom that Christ purchased for her. 

Over the last few weeks as I've been living in this passage, I've taken her back repeatedly as we've texted, repeatedly to the words of Jesus to the sinner woman in Luke 7, “Your sins, which are many, have been forgiven. Go in peace” (see Luke 7:48, 50).

This woman met recently with a godly couple to discuss all of this. And she shared with me afterwards what they said to her at the end of the evening. They said, 

From everything you've shared it seems to us that you have repented. This is gone before God. Live a life of ongoing repentance. But this is no longer your life and no longer the focus of your repentance. There is freedom and peace from this that is the past now. 

To which I responded in a text, “Your sins, which are many, have been forgiven. Go in peace. Signed, Jesus”

 

Dannah: Don’t you love that? Shame and condemnation don’t have to control you. That’s Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth, from a series on Luke chapter 7, called “Who Loves More?” You’ll find a link to that series in the transcript of today’s program, at ReviveOurHearts.com.

Our January donation-of-any-amount offer is a set of Scripture Cards that remind you of God’s presence with you. I think that’s a great way to fight the temptation to despair—remembering He’s with you, and you’re in His presence. 

The cards are 5 inches by 7 inches, and they’re designed artistically. If you have the 2026 Revive Our Hearts calendar, they match that style. It’s a wonderful way to keep God’s Word in front of you throughout your day. 

Contact us with your donation, request the In His PresenceScripture Cards, and we’ll also include the 2026 Bible reading plan. I sure hope you’ll take us up on this. To give, head to ReviveOurHearts.com/Donate, or call us at 1-800-569-5959.

Tomorrow, Nancy kicks off an interesting series that’s all about how we got our English Bible. I hope you’ll join us for that here on Revive Our Hearts. Now, to close our program today, let’s head back to that conversation I had with Portia Collins.

You know, if you've been listening to Portia's story, you probably have something in common with her hiding, with the shame she's experienced, whether you've had an abortion or experienced some other type of sin. I hope you've heard the power of telling someone. 

Christianity isn't a solo sport. It's a communal experience. We receive forgiveness from Jesus Christ and Him alone, but He has given us each other to do the work of healing in our hearts and to do the work of making good decisions so we don't have as much healing to do. So if you're carrying a secret right now, our prayer for you today is that you would tell someone. 

And Portia, I want to know, would you just pray, pray for the woman who needs the courage to open her mouth?

Portia: Yes, absolutely!

Heavenly Father, Lord, You know all things. You see all things. You hold all things in Your hand. So right now in this moment, I know you see the woman who has been carrying a secret—whether it’s abortion or some other sin. Whatever it is, You know, God.

So I pray that in this moment You will touch her heart and speak to her so that she can tell someone, so that she can be free, Lord. Connect her right now with people in her life who can pour the truth of Your Word into her, who can walk alongside her, who can help her, who can share the burden.

Lord, as I’m praying, I’m reminded in Galatians 6 and verses 1–2, how we are called to share in one another’s burdens. And so, this woman has probably been walking around carrying this burden, carrying this sin, for a long time. I pray that You will send those who are godly in her life to help pull her out of the pit, Lord, to help her to walk in freedom and newness of life, to help her to walk in redemption, Lord!

There’s a path that You, Jesus, have opened up for us—to longer be bound by our sin, to no longer have to submit to our sin. You opened up a way for us to walk in freedom, in life, in love, in light! 

And so I pray right now in this moment that, whoever this woman is, she will just take off running down that path that You’ve opened up for her; that she will open up her mouth and be free and tell the truth and speak openly about what it is that she’s carrying, and that she will trust You, God, the God of all Creation, but the One who specifically made us in His image. I pray that she will trust Your love for her, that she will trust who You are, that she will trust Your heart for Your people, O God! It’s in Jesus Christ’s Name that I pray, amen.

Dannah: Amen! Hey, before you go today, friend, I want to ask you if you could cover Nancy in prayer for the next twenty-four hours or so. As you may know, her husband Robert Wolgemuth went home to be with the Lord a little less than two weeks ago, and tomorrow we will be remembering the life of Robert Wolgemuth. Would you pray that it would not only honor Robert’s exemplary life, but also bring incredible glory to our Lord and Savior!

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