I Had a Horrific Childhood. I’m Glad I Exist.

It is midnight, and my phone is ringing. Blinking the sleep out of my eyes, I roll over to see my older sister’s name flashing across the screen.

“Hello?”

My sister says nothing at first. She is crying. The sound jolts me awake.

“Are you okay?” I ask.

Finally, she speaks: “I killed my baby.”

Shock lodges itself in my throat. My sister’s pain is suddenly in my chest, crushing my heart against my rib cage. I scramble down the bunk bed ladder, my feet slipping on the rungs, and tiptoe past my sleeping roommate. “Just a second,” I whisper, holding my hand over the phone’s speaker until I’ve left the dorm.

“He made me do it,” she says, sobbing. “I didn’t think it would be a big deal.” The pavement grits against my bare feet. “I killed my daughter. I’m going to hell.”

Eventually, I discerned what had happened. My sister had been pregnant. And then, at 12 weeks, she’d had an abortion. She was pressured by her boyfriend, who said that he couldn’t afford to take care of the children he’d already had with other women, let alone another one.

I am not equipped. I have no words to offer.

I clutch the phone to my ear and I stand in the wind and I listen.

When we were young, my sister and I had many late-night talks about our determination to be better parents than our own. The abuse we braved as children in the years before we were adopted is almost too heavy to express, too horrible to justify with language. Our parents were addicted to drugs. They bloodied and bruised us; they admired the whip marks their belts left on our skin, and put their cigarettes out on our elbows and knees. Until the age of eight, I ate only baby food.

My sister and I survived together. And yet as we grew, my sister began to shut me out. She left home suddenly, with no way to contact her; she entered a relationship with an abusive man. After a while, I stopped fighting to keep a connection. The door between us stayed closed, and I stopped knocking—until it cracked open that chilly spring night.

That desperate call was more than five years ago, but my sister’s words still ring in my ears. She thought she was doing the right thing. The father was abusive and money was tight. But her grief was a confirmation: Every human life has intrinsic value, no matter the poverty or cruelty or chaos that life is born into. My sister had discovered this the hard way, the same way she had learned most of her lessons.

“Every child, a wanted child.” The 1923 Planned Parenthood slogan has a horrific subtext; if a woman believes that she’s ill-equipped to be a mother, or that her partner is ill-equipped to be a father, or that her home will be an unhappy one, then abortion is encouraged. It’s not just an option; it’s a solution. It’s responsible. It’s the right thing to do.

Pro-abortion advocates have long suggested that abortion access improves future outcomes for women and children. In June of 1978, the National Abortion Rights Action League published Legal Abortion: A Speaker’s and Debater’s Notebook. Among other talking points, it asserted that “a policy that makes contraception and abortion freely available will greatly reduce the number of unwanted children, and thereby curb the tragic rise of child abuse in our great country.”

These arguments have persisted into the 21st century. In 2002, an article in the American Economic Reviewclaimed that “unwanted children may be more subject to child abuse and neglect by their parents or care-takers than are desired children. … Abortion availability may reduce the number of unwanted children … leading to lower rates of child abuse and neglect.”

“There’s a lot to be said for preventing babies from being born who are going to be unwelcome and therefore have a rotten childhood,” argued a Guardian columnist in 2016. “A few years ago the crime figures of New York were suddenly much lower than they had been, and researchers linked the fact to high numbers of abortions in the year when the potential criminals would otherwise have been born.”

“Unwanted” children are less likely to succeed in school and make money, wrote a trio of psychology professors around the time of the Dobbs leak: “We are focused on preventing the transmission of risk factors for poor economic, social, physical and mental well-being for parents and children.”

“Every child, a wanted child.” By this formulation, a child’s dignity is determined not by the fact of their existence but by the extent of their parents’ desire and their likelihood of future “success.” A child’s personhood is contingent. It would be better for suffering children, children like me and my sister, to have never been born at all than to experience those cigarette burns and baby-food lunches.

But the prospect of a rough upbringing, even one as traumatic as mine, should never be remedied by removing a child’s opportunity to live at all. Abortion discounts the redemptive power of God—and the “wantedness” inherent in our creation.

Genesis tells us that we are sanctified, set apart, created in the image of God (Gen. 1:26–27). Psalm 139 elucidates the intrinsic value that God places on every person, value that comes only from the Father, not from any earthly parents. We are “fearfully and wonderfully made,” knit together, our days ordained. 

Mark 8:36 shows that one human soul alone has more worth than the entire world of material possessions: “What good is it for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul?” Even in the direst circumstances—even if a child is born with a deformity, even if a child will go hungry, even if a child will be hurt—God imparts boundless value on their life. My sister should have kept her daughter, even given her boyfriend, her instability, her past. In spite of the pain, I’m glad that my parents kept us.

God’s hand is evident in my life, especially after my adoption by two wonderful people. I was the first person in my family to graduate from college, and with highest honors. God gave me gifts in writing and music. Now, I lead worship for youth and young adult programs at my church. My participation in youth ministry is an outlet for me to ensure all children are shown love.

“Every child, a wanted child” implies that the goodness of my life today isn’t worth my bad beginning. But I know that’s not true.

My sister April is a mother now. She has two beautiful sons, Edward and Justin. April learned she was pregnant with Edward only a month after she lost her daughter. “When I got pregnant again a month later,” she reflects, “it was almost like God was saying, ‘Did you think I didn’t know what I was doing?’”

Randi Bianchi is a church administrator and writer.

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