My Abortion Story of Deception and Redemption

 

Many times, when a person chooses a life career or ministry it's because they have a personal connection or life experience with it.

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For me, it seems my entire life story was one in which God was preparing me for a ministry to help people who were broken sexually, just as I was. This scripture describes it perfectly:

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"Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our affliction so that we will be able to comfort those who are in any affliction with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God" (2 Corinthians 1:3-4).

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In the past, I've only shared this story with our clients. I've never shared it publicly. My story has been redeemed by God's grace, but it is a difficult one to read about. It involves premarital sex, sin, abortion, sexual abuse and trauma, But it also involves glory in my salvation story, God's healing and redemption, his call to ministry, and my marriage to Bill. I'm praying that as you read it, you will be encouraged and ministered to as well as amazed at God's miraculous healing in my life.

 

My Story: Part 1

At seventeen years old, the world's weight was on my shoulders. Early in the morning, I was sitting on the curb, depressed, fearful, and hopeful all at the same time, waiting for AAA to come and fix my boyfriend's spectacular new minivan that he worshipped. It had suddenly broken down on the way. There was a huge relief that this may be a sign. Perhaps it was a sign from God that I would not have to go through with it. My boyfriend was resolute. He would do whatever it took to get me to that appointment. You see, a difficult life-changing decision had been made, a change that would devastate my life and also end the life of another.

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Time ticked on; my appointment had expired. I was elated. I could wait. Face this decision later. Make a different choice. But my boyfriend said, “We'll just go and see what they say.” Abortion had just become legal a few years earlier and had already become a well-oiled machine. They wanted my boyfriend's measly $250, so of course, they could fit me in. I shook uncontrollably while waiting for my name to be called. I was petrified, lying on the table with the operation light shining brightly overhead. They had me count to ten, but by the time I counted to three, I was out. The murder had taken place. I woke up. A mixture of relief and depression, and loss took over. No one would ever know. I wouldn't be humiliated. My dreams of college and making something of myself was still on track. They told me that the bleeding would stop after a few days and this event would be a blip on the screen of my life, quickly forgotten. But I was never one to forget. I was already weeping inside that the life inside me was no longer. Waves of grief engulfed me and continued to consume me while everyone around me either didn't know I had gotten pregnant or the few who told me it was the right choice.

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Many years later God said to me, "My grace is not your own to keep. It must be shared," so I decided to write my story. How could God's grace ever cover the death of my unborn child? I didn't deserve His forgiveness, but He handed it to me anyway with His fierce and loving pursuit of me.

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My life went on, and within a year, true to statistics, I was pregnant again with the same boyfriend. Part of me wondered if I had gotten pregnant again to replace the life I grieved silently. My boyfriend was an alcoholic. I never drank but was drunk the night that protection was not used. I had to decide again, but this time I wouldn't allow anyone to talk me into an abortion. Usually a good student, I was failing in college anyway. I was depressed. I didn't show up to most of my classes. Abortion was never the answer the first time. It just brought more problems. My boyfriend tried everything to get me to get another abortion. As a last-ditch effort, he asked me to meet with his older sister and brother-in-law. At the time, I was unsure of her intentions. I knew she had dropped out of high school, married her boyfriend, and given birth to her daughter three years earlier. I also knew they had difficulty making it financially, and their marriage was rocky, but now they had two beautiful children.

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Much to my dismay, I soon found out the purpose of the meeting - talking me into an abortion. His sister’s objections were practical. How would I support the baby? I was in college, and I would have to drop out, and then I would have to live a meager existence as a single parent. Did I realize the eighteen-year plus commitment of raising a child? I didn't have any rational answers to her questions, so I blurted out what I thought miraculously the Lord had put in my heart, "This child is a gift of God, and I don't want to kill it!" She refuted it with, "Abortion is not murder," and walked over to the telephone to call a friend of a friend's pastor to come over to set me straight that an abortion wasn't wrong.

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It was 1:00 in the morning, but I can still remember the plant the pastor pointed to, which had a light shining through it so I could see its veins with life running through them. He said, "Just like that plant, your baby is alive in your womb and already has a brain and nervous system. God created the baby growing inside you and is intimately acquainted with your baby just as He is with you." Then he told us that Jesus died for our sins and loved us. Before we knew it, we had all kneeled to receive the Lord as our Savior. My boyfriend and I married, and I gave birth to a baby girl we named Janelle. Years later, I discovered the Biblical meaning of Janelle's name; "God is gracious." Jesus not only saved the life of my unborn baby, but He also saved my life and began a long process of emotional healing from not only the previous abortion but from the sexual and emotional trauma I had endured as a child.

 

My Story: Part 2

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Not even twenty-one years old yet. I had one abortion, an unplanned pregnancy, and an abusive marriage. And I was a new, baby Christian.

 

My husband's alcoholism led him to abuse me physically. Then I found him in bed with my best friend. A year later, after we divorced, I attended a company New Year's Eve party at the owner's house. I was the only woman working for the company; my ex-husband was my boss. I wanted to make him jealous, so I began flirting with my co-workers. Although I was feisty, there was a passing thought that I was in way over my head. I was very drunk for the second time in my life and feeling sick, so I went upstairs to lie down. The company's owner came in, got on top of me, and raped me. I remember feeling like I was removed from my body. I was out of it and comatose. My mind was saying "No," but no words came out of my mouth. I wanted to get him off me, but I felt powerless. I ended up pregnant again.

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​​For over twenty years, the enemy terrorized me daily by telling me I was responsible for the rape happening because I asked for it by flirting and getting drunk. I pushed those thoughts down and said to myself that my daughter wasn't the rapist’s, but my new boyfriend's baby I was now dating and sleeping with. We were fastidious in using protection because he and his parents were Christian. But I lied to myself and to him.

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It took me twenty years to finally admit that I was raped because he took advantage of me when I was physically and emotionally incapacitated. As the owner of the business, he also had power over me. I took responsibility for getting drunk and putting myself in an unsafe situation, but not for the rape. The Lord told me that my child was a gift no matter how she was conceived. Her name means "precious jewel."

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I married my new boyfriend, who I told myself was my daughter's father. He was a self-absorbed guy too, but he wasn't an alcoholic, and that was enough for me! Over time, I felt neglected and unseen by him. He was a religious man but not a believer. He went to church to look good on the outside.​

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One time, when I stopped by his work unexpectedly, I heard his voice from the other room, but I had never witnessed those raunchy words coming out of his mouth. When I walked into the room, I noticed he had taken off his ring and slyly put it back on. Later, I discovered he was having an affair with a woman at work by looking at our credit card bill and seeing hotel rooms and flowers sent to her. I confronted him. I felt like God was punishing me for getting drunk and having sex with another man (I didn’t t know at the time that it was rape). After two years of marriage we divorced, and I was a single mother of two daughters, and I was celibate for over twenty years.

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My Story: Part 3

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You have glorious places in your story where you've been found by God and you've allowed His love to surround you, and messy places where you pursued the world, and your own desires instead of His.

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Whether you want to admit it or not, it's apparent that sexual trauma, neglect, fatherlessness, and abuse begets sexual sin and even sexual repression.

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Lost and Vulnerable

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The moment I was born, the enemy came roaring in to steal, kill and destroy my heart, femininity, and sexuality. I was born to a mother and father who didn't know how to be intimate with each other, let alone know how to love me. I think my parents were too much in their own pain to delight in me. Looking at my childhood pictures, I look sad, lost, and forlorn. My sister and I witnessed violent fighting between our parents whenever our father would pick us up or drop us off. After a while, he didn't come to see us anymore.

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My mother remarried, and for the first time, I was enjoyed. With my stepfather, I could be silly and playful. I remember dancing around the front room with some silky curtains as he clapped and smiled at me. He would throw me in the air and play with me. For the first time, this little girl tasted what it felt like to be enjoyed - my feminine heart was at rest.

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Unfortunately, my mother became ill with endometriosis. She had a complete hysterectomy at 28 years old. Her doctors did not give her any hormones, and her emotions became even more unstable. My mother and stepfather divorced when I was four, and I never heard from him again either.

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​I was molested or raped six times by six different men from infancy to young adulthood. I was fatherless, unprotected, and not provided for. My dignity was never there. I never had guidance about how gorgeous my feminine soul was or even taught my worth or value other than what I did through performance or in my outward beauty.

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The Lord certainly had His work cut out with me to begin healing in my life. By the time I was 24 years old, I had been divorced twice with two daughters to raise on my own. During those years as a single mom raising two daughters alone, I struggled with making ends meet. But God never forsook me.

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​As a single parent, I worked for a national ministry and traveled around the country helping churches set-up single-parent ministries to help them with emotional and financial help. I wrote magazine articles for Focus on the Family and was a ghostwriter for Dr. James Dobson about single parenting issues. I have had multiple years of counseling over my childhood trauma. The Lord has been faithful. His grace has extended throughout my life. I returned to college and earned a Master's degree in Christian counseling.

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Here is another glorious moment in my life. It happened when my eldest daughter was 11 years old. A new church had begun across the street, and I thought it would be fun to visit. As the pastor gave his sermon, I thought he looked familiar. He was thinking the same thing because he had tears in his eyes, kept staring at me, and couldn't continue his sermon. He approached me and asked me if I was the young woman he had led to the Lord, and looking at Janelle, he wondered if she was the child that was saved from abortion. I nodded. He broke down crying. Janelle was not sure what was going on. Thankfully, by then, I had told her how God saved her life and what her name meant, and that God had an amazing purpose and calling for her. I explained to her that this was the pastor who saved her life. He went back up to continue his sermon, and after asking my permission, he shared how he had led me to the Lord and saved my daughter.

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God loves to remind us of His faithfulness.

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My Story: Part 4

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You Tell Your Life Story When You Make Love

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Next, you're going to read about how our stories affected our marriage, and our lovemaking. That's because everything that has happened to a person (both the glorious and the depraved) before marriage impacts their future marriage bed. We hand this dowry to our new spouse on our wedding night. After counseling couples for over 17 years we have come to see that most sexual problems become evident on their wedding night or honeymoon.

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Bill and I Reconnect

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I first met Bill more than 20 years ago when I was twenty-eight and he was thirty-nine. He was my home church pastor, and we spent four years together in fellowship. As single parents, we supported one another and prayed for the restoration of our marriages. I always loved him as a friend, and once or twice considered us being romantic. I didn’t risk my heart because I thought he was too old for me, and he also seemed to be in love with his ex-wife. I moved to Colorado, and we lost touch.

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Thirteen years later, our eldest daughters grew up and met each other at a mutual friend’s wedding. They asked each other if the other’s parent was still single. They decided to reconnect us after finding out we were. We began a long-distance friendship. A few years later, Bill decided to visit me in Colorado for the summer. He had stepped down from his pastorship in California and wanted to teach others about grace. He was excited for our two ministries to become one.

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When I picked him up from the airport, I could tell he was unnerved by my new weight loss. I had changed from the “mommy look” to a new “sexy, voluptuous woman” look. Bill proposed within two weeks of his visit, and we were married in the autumn. Bill also repressed his sexual feelings for twenty years and had a pornography addiction. Every six months, he would move out of repression and into sexually acting out with porn and then back to repression. He despised this and struggled with shame.

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Our Sexual Brokenness and Healing

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Our repression over 20 years (managing our sexuality with legalism) and Bill's pornography addiction affected our sex life. Bill struggled with erectile dysfunction, and I believed it was all my fault. I was so depressed that I had waited twenty years to make love to my husband, and it only worked if he was on drugs. His E.D. only made my body image issues worse. I returned to school at the Institute for Sexual Wholeness to learn how to solve our sexual problems since we couldn't find any help. I earned a postgraduate certificate in Christian Sex Therapy.

 

We used Christian mind-body work, and allowed God to bring healing for our sexual dysfunctions, which were due to past sexual abuse (both Bill and I), the way we handled our sexuality when we were single for twenty years, trust issues, guilt, shame, and body image problems.

 

I’ve learned that older men need physical stimulation to become erect. I now know he is attracted to me. Now our lovemaking is even more glorious. I’ve learned that his erection and its ebbs and flows have nothing to do with me or my attractiveness.

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Our Course to Recapture Wholeness and Purity​

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Helping Others Heal

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We opened a private counseling practice in Colorado Springs and have counseled sexually broken people for over 17 years. We teach clients that a sexually whole person sees their sexuality as a gift from the Lord. They use their sexuality to glorify Him, protect the sexuality of others and eventually use it to minister to their future spouse by serving them while allowing their spouse to minister to them in return. The sexually whole person continually seeks the Lord for direction and healing from unholy condemnation, guilt, and shame.

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I am a work in process. There are many more places to heal, including deeper healing of my body image and my demand for my husband to come through for me the way I desperately need because of my past wounds. The Lord continually heals me through my intimate relationship with both my earthly husband, Bill, and my heavenly Husband. Rather than doing something to achieve greater sexual wholeness, I believe the Lord wants my feminine heart to finally be at "rest" just as it was with my stepfather but in a more profound way - knowing that He is faithful to move towards me with His love, grace, and truth. He continually asks me to dance with Him, and I’ve experienced His delight over me.

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My Lifetime Scripture Verse

 

"Fear not, for you will not be put to shame; and do not feel humiliated, for you will not be disgraced; But you will forget the shame of your youth, and the reproach of your widowhood you will remember no more. For your husband is your Maker, whose name is the LORD of hosts; and your Redeemer is the Holy One of Israel Who is called the God of all the earth" (Isaiah 54: 4-5).

                                                               Janean Fuller