Transcript:
This is I Choose Life News and Views sponsored by Indiana Right to Life at Northeast Indiana, committed to defending innocent human life for all people of all ages. Your hosts are Cathie Humbarger, Abigail Lorenzen, and Scott Kump
Welcome to I Choose Life News and Views! I’m Cathie Humbarger, I’m Abigail Lorenzen, and I’m Scott Kump. I Choose Life News and Views is produced by Bott Radio Network in Fort Wayne, in cooperation with Indiana Right to Life as well as Right to Life of Northeast Indiana! And now, the Pro-Life news!
On Friday evening, July 10th, as part of the Life Defenders training camp at St. Francis University in Fort Wayne, Seth Drayer of Created Equal began a formal debate with Black Lives Matter activist and former candidate for Allen County Council, Erin Fogg. The resolution, “elective abortion is a moral wrong”, with Seth arguing in the affirmative and Erin opposing the resolution. The evening did not go as planned, as Ms. Fogg left the building in the middle of the debate. You can view the debate, or segments of it, at Created Equal’s Facebook page or YouTube channel. For the YouTube channel, go on CreatedEqual.org, go to “projects”, and scroll to the bottom. In the whole video, the formal debate begins about 8 minutes in.
Today we have with us a young woman named Paula Peyton and she has been working as the executive director of an organization named ‘Hope After Rape Conception’, and I think you can tell from the name of it why I think it’s important to have her on our program and let you all know what ‘Hope After Rape Conception’ and Paula are doing.
Abigail: Hi Paula! Thanks for joining us!
Paula: Hey there! Thanks so much for having me!
Abigail: Yeah, I’ve been actually really looking forward to this interview, so I’m excited to have you on, and you’re not only the history of the organization, and also forward looking with it, as well as your own story; I think you have a story that can really inspire people. So, interested in hearing you share that as well, but why don’t we just start off with a brief overview of the organization. ‘Hope After Rape Conception’ gives us, I think, a pretty good idea, but give us a little bit of this organization’s history.
Paula: Sure, so many years ago, there were a couple mothers from rape who were actually law students and attorneys eventually who moved out with custody issues where their rapists actually sued for custody of their daughters…
Abigail: Oh my gosh...
Paula: and they had gotten connected with each other and kind of realized that there was some work that really needed to be done legislatively across our nation and their state for sure, but at that time, but at that time, basically every state in the United States. They started working toward getting some of those legislative changes made to protect families like theirs. So, ‘Hope After Rape Conception’ was initially birthed and they did some fantastic work where they did some wonderful ground work, but as mom and attorneys, especially moms who are attorneys, they got busy, and just kind of slowly, sort of, went defunct, not as a plan, but didn’t have time to invest in it any longer. So it got dormant for many years; basically it was just an old Facebook page there, and I was able to get permission from all those formally involved early this year after I started doing all of the work they had been doing before as well as some new projects and was able to get it incorporated as a Pro-Life non-profit ministry. That became official in April and we’re super new, especially as a non-profit. To me I feel that I’m called to do the work and what that looks like for us can be very different depending on the needs of our client…
Abigail: Yeah…
Paula: We are working to make a smoother referral process, so if anyone listening to this and happens to be a Pro-Life family attorney, please get in touch with us because we’d love to add you to the database that we’re working on because when we have mom’s contacting us with custody issues, we’re able to refer them to attorneys, bonus points if that can be reduced cost of pro bono work because a lot of our moms are low income. There’s just so much lacking in the way of offering women who are pregnant from rape hope, so whether that be counseling a pregnant rape victim who thinking “I don’t know what I should do; is it even normal for me to love my baby?”, it totally is, but offering that hope and support, whether it be a referral to an attorney or a licensed counselor; they really need more of that authentic medical psychiatric help. That can be for a pregnant woman or someone who was raped 50 years ago; that need for counseling never goes away, we all need to heal and have that experience after trauma. It could also look like an online baby shower with a registry or offering community support, getting them connected to others who know what it’s like, but our mission in a nutshell is to assist mother’s from and their children in every step of the way, so also we work with people conceived in rape, and if they need a referral for counseling or need to talk to folks, we do a lot of educational work, advocacy. We’re still working with some of these laws: the law in the state I live in, Tennessee, does not protect my own family, so you have about half that have the ideal legislation and all but one that has some form of protection, but we’re working on the second half caught up with more ideal protection that would protect all families impacted by rape conception versus just a small percentage. We’re still working legislatively and we’re doing a lot of different projects, it varies by need, and we assess that individually.
Abigail: Yeah, I’m sure it can vary case by case. I want to back up a second to something that’s amazing to me; it’s the rape survivor-child custody act, which is passed on a federal level, that these original moms helped write the wording for, and I want to bask in that for a moment, because you have these moms who are moms because they were raped, conceived, parented their kids, and they’re law students, lawyers, and they help to write the language for federal legislation that then protects families like theirs. I love that, and I especially love that in light of the abortion conversation basically telling woman that, if they have a baby, they can’t do x y z: they can’t finish school, they can’t have a career…
Paula: Not just mothers from rape, every mother, “you can’t do anything once you have a baby”, and that’s a really cool part of our history, and that federal law is amazing; it’s our ideal language which is what I mentioned because we’re trying to have states with non-ideal language to update their language, and that federal piece of legislation actually offers monetary incentives toward rape victim programs….
Abigail: Wow..
Paula: ...for states that pass that particular language. There’s often times legislators who look at this and think “this is a waste of time”, and it’s not because it impacts thousands of families, and at minimum, twenty-four thousand families a year in the United States…
Abigail: Wow…
Paula: ...and that’s just the new births; it’s not counting the twenty-four thousand from last year and the year before and the year before that. These custody issues can pop up at any time in 18 years, so thousands and thousands, hundreds of thousands, who are impacted with minor children every year that are looking at these laws being an incredibly important of this legislative agenda. I know it’s important for our family; the road map they’ve laid out is incredible.
Abigail: Yeah, that is incredible. So, Paula, you’ve mentioned your family and your situation a few times. Could you fill us in a little bit of what your story looks like and why it’s so essential to the story you want to accomplish.
Paula: Yeah, I myself was conceived in rape in 1991, my mother was raped and had me, and I didn’t grow up in an idealistic childhood: it was quite a mess that she had some issues prior to my birth that spilled over and did not make for the greatest layout for her as far as parenting goes. But, I’m very much happy to be alive and happy to be here; I’m 24 myself and would have considered myself “personally Pro-Life, politically Pro-Choice”, as if that’s actually a thing, but I had been groomed by places like Planned Parenthood employees who were running a youth group at a community center that I started getting involved with at 16. They got me involved asking me questions like “don’t you want to help women?”, and what 16-year-old girl would say “no, I don’t believe in woman’s rights, I hate women, I have a mother and I hate us all”? No one’s going to say that, and I slowly got involved, got more and more involved, and was high up volunteering with Planned Parenthood locally in Memphis Tennessee for a while and also volunteered for a private abortion facility here and did a lot in that way that I regret now and wish I could take back, but I take the knowledge that I got and want to use that for good. When I was 24, I was gang-raped at gun point, and when that happened, I started the process of converting and becoming Pro-Life, and what I encountered was that, after the rape, while I was depressed living in this dark time, I found that I was pregnant, and I smiled for the first time because I felt that God had given my pain a purpose and I had a reason to get up every day and I had a reason to keep going whereas before I didn’t know why I was alive and didn’t want to be alive. However, I now have someone to live for and I had this bright spot in my life, but unfortunately, people at the Church I was attending at that time were complete opposite of supportive and the clergy wouldn’t even speak to me because I wouldn’t have an abortion. It was very intense, and they would all describe themselves as “Pro-Choice” because it’s a very Liberal group. What I learned is that choice is a myth: they knew the so-called “choice that I made”, I never considered abortion and my son was just my baby and I loved him intensely from the moment he existed, but they didn’t support choices outside of abortion. That cemented it for me and that was the final piece of the puzzle for me to become Pro-Life. I dealt with intense pressure from those people I had worked for at the diocese at the Church for a time and the people there were my closest friends; we went to Church together, we worked together, we saw each other multiple times a week, they were my inner circle. I tell people that it was worse than the rape itself, dealing with that, because it was 24/7: they were texting me, calling me, they would see me at Church and approach me and ask me “why are you not getting rid of the devil baby?”, Satan, they called my baby everything under the sun and a lot more awful things you probably couldn’t think of. What they didn’t realize that I just find so ironic is that me, the person who had baby-sat all of their kids and loved and called me angel, I was conceived in rape, and they didn’t know that, and they just assumed that anyone conceived in rape would be awful and evil and they said that my baby would taint the gene pool and grow up to be a rapist and be horrible and I would regret it and that it would only be a reminder of the rape and they had no idea that the person they were saying that to was conceived in rape, the person they loved until then was conceived in rape. But I just continued: God’s plans were bigger, and I wouldn’t let people steal the joy God gave me. Unfortunately, that continued: there was a wealthier woman at the Church that was offering, in Tennessee abortion stops at 20 weeks, but she was offering to pay to fly me to New Mexico for a late-term abortion where they have no laws on the books whatsoever. They go up to full-term and she was offering to pay to fly me there, telling me it wasn’t too late to fix this mistake, and all of that. I was 35 weeks pregnant and she was still saying this. I had been calling my son by name for months at this point and I that was the vibe, the general horrific reality that I dealt with.
Abigail: Wow! So maybe, as a Pro-Life person, I have a hard time wrapping my head around things sometimes that are coming from the other side, but this, I don’t get this at all: I don’t get how a whole group of people could be so interested in making you change your mind, like why couldn’t they accept that you wanted that baby!?
Paula: I think we see this a lot with women who are pregnant from rape: one of the things that gets said to us, not necessarily to everyone, but a good majority of us has experienced, is that, because we’re victims of rape, we’re unable to love our children. I think why people come to that conclusion varies. Some people in the Pro-Life, unfortunately, make exceptions; they say, “I understand that in cases like rape why this would happen”. I think in that instance it’s misplaced compassion because they’re not educated on the data, on what we actually believe: the overwhelming majority of us choose life and those choosing life, the majority are choosing parenting over adoption. That’s just the reality: women who do have abortions after rape, the major study that was done recently by Dr. David Reardon, 80% of them experience regret and said that they wished they had not had an abortion and said that it was the wrong solution, that it didn’t help. Women undergoing abortion after rape will often tell you that that experience was worse because it’s one they chose and was just as violent and just as traumatic. I think a lot of times people who tend to value life but don’t in those cases are showing misplaced compassion; they’re not educated about it. It’s something I’m hoping to change with ‘Hope After Rape Conception’ and getting the truth out there and showing those facts with people. But I think that with people on the pro-choice side, cases like ours, the so-called hard cases, that’s what for decades has been used to justify abortion in our country. I mean, Roe vs Wade, there was a “why” of rape used in those hearings, and actually, if you look at footnotes of before the Roe ruling that was handed down by the Supreme Court justices, they actually cite the existence of exceptions in the state law of Texas at the time as being something that undermines their argument for personhood under the 14th amendment. The issue of rape is entrenched in this whole argument, in this whole argument for and against abortion: it’s the core of it and it’s how we got here. I think that, for them, seeing a rape victim becoming pregnant and intensely, fiercely, loving my child, it was undermining their whole stance on an issue, that they had an agenda to push, so it wasn’t okay. I think it’s pretty common for people to go back to that and say “well we can’t let this go because, if she loves her baby, then other people might love their baby”, and this whole argument that we have that keeps coming back over and over again, it undermines the whole thing. Kristin Hawkins with Students for Life of America actually put out a video of an old speech that she gave at a college or university on Instagram about how we would never tell a rape victim that it’s okay to tell the rape victim it’s okay to kill her child conceived in rape once her child is two. If that change it, then it’s literally the same argument of “should abortion be legal or should it not be”, because it takes out the issue of rape altogether, and once she pointed that I try to help people all the time, and I appreciate her for doing this, is that, when that issue is brought and is never brought of genuine concern, it’s a fake concern put up to push an agenda.
Abigail: I’ve been told by some other woman who have conceived because of rape that they feel like they’re being used as the poster child of the pro-choice movement and yet they’re never asked what they think, they’re never asked what they feel, and they’re thrown under the bus while simultaneously being put on the windshield.
Paula: Absolutely, and there have been a few major studies done. I know it’s not just me and it’s not just them, it’s not a small percentage of mothers of rape who feel this way, it’s absolutely majority that feel this way. Dr. Sandra Mahkorn cited in her study, and she talked about this in a paper she wrote for a journal, saying that “people never stop and actually console pregnant rape victims about how they feel or what they believe, they just make assumptions and use our stories, they really co-opt them, to push an agenda that they came in with”, and it’s not an agenda that we agree with. Like I said, the studies have shown nearly identical numbers, it’s nearly 73~85 percent choose life: there are some that have miscarriages outside of that percentage and the rest, unfortunately, are lost to abortion, and the majority of those who are lost to abortion, those woman report being heavily coerced, either by a rapist, whether it be like a trafficker, or if the rapist was someone in their family and potentially molesting them, like in the case of a young girl, or just by friends and family. I know that to be true, and had God not made me the most stubborn person I’ve ever met, I don’t know what I would have done….
Abigail: *Laughs*
Paula: It’s true, and I tell people every time: I remind myself every day because my son is in that terrible two’s phase, and we can be positive and try to work at it as the terrific two and I try but it is rough some days. But, I just remind myself that I am glad that he is such a stubborn person because it will carry him well one day, but it’s true: we’re not consulted about how we feel, we’re used as the poster child for something we want no part of, and it’s very frustrating because I feel like people constantly want to use us, use our stories: we’ve been victimized enough and I don’t want to continue to be victimized by the pro-choice lobby.
Abigail: You go get ‘em Paula! Another thing that amazes me is what you mentioned earlier about people asking, “is it normal for me to love my baby?” That is a heartbreaking to me that the pro-choice rhetoric has managed, and even misinformed or uninformed pro-lifers have managed, to convince people that they shouldn’t love their babies. That is so sad!
Paula: They love their children and they have to sit there and wonder if they’re going completely crazy for loving their children, and I experienced that too. I mean, everyone around you is telling you that you’re crazy, you start to wonder if it’s true, and it’s not crazy to love our child…
Abigail: That’s right, it’s how we’re wired…
Paula: I’ve heard supportive people say “well, it’s not the rapist’s baby, it’s the mother’s baby”, and that’s absolutely true: please do not call my child a rapist baby. We are children of rape victims, but beyond that, I would even say that, when people say that “they’re just as much the rapist’s child as the mother’s child”, no: you are more the rape victim’s child because that’s who carries you, even more one-sided because it’s not like in a traditional family where dad is over there playing with mom’s belly and talking to you, no, there is no other relationship. You have a mother, and you are a rape victim’s child.
Abigail: It’s amazing to hear you talk, Paula. I love the honesty. You’re interested in resurrecting this organization, ‘Hope After Rape Conception,’ to help people. If our listeners want to get involved, where’s the best place to find you? I know your guys’ website is under construction a little bit as you are a fledgling organization, really. Is the website the best spot or is Facebook better?
Paula: I would say either one. Our website is hopeafterrapeconception.org and it’s under construction, we’re adding to it all the time. There’s a good bit now and you can sign up for our email list, we promise that we won’t spam you…..
Abigail: *Laughs*
Paula: We haven’t sent out any yet, if that makes you feel better, but we do have an option, and we will send out hopefully soon, we’re going to start sending out a monthly newsletter, but we also have a form out there: anyone who’s been affected by rape conception, whether you are a mother or were conceived from rape, grandmother from rape, the list goes on, but if we you were affected by rape conception and would like to get involved or get connected with others or need help, we have a separate button you can click on our website. Also, on Facebook, we have a little handle thing with a URL, you know, we’re facebook.com/hopefaterrapeconception, if you do a search for us on Facebook, because of their filters…
Abigail: Oh….
Paula: Our page name is a little wonky: it’s ‘Hope After R*pe Conception’, but the “a” has an asterisk because the filters…
Abigail: They won’t let you type it…
Paula: Won’t let us type ‘rape’.
Abigail: You know I noticed that and I thought they did that to make it more kid friendly or something like so if mom has another Facebook page or something, but that’s interesting! So it’s an asterisk? It’s R-asterisk-p-e?
Paula: Yes
Abigail: Good to know. And, if we have people who are hoping to be a resource for the people who contact you, so you mentioned for instance counselors, attorneys, should they email you or should they give you a call and say, ‘hey can we be on your referral list?’?
Paula: Yes, so if you want to email me, I mean you can do it on our website or connect on Facebook, either way, we would be happy to get you added and get you plugged in.
Abigail: Anything else you would want to share with our listeners?
Paula: Yes, well number one, we already talked about this, it is normal to love our babies. But, in addition, one of those things people ask me often is ‘how can I handle this?’. What do I do if someone tells me that they’re pregnant from rape or that they were conceived in rape, and again, it varies from person to person. The circumstances of that conversation, you may be talking to a woman who’s pregnant and considering an abortion or you may be talking to a 50-year old man who is finally ready to tell somebody the circumstances of his conception, but just listen: listen more than you talk, support them, pray with them, pray for them, offer them hope, get them connected with us, and we’ll be happy to welcome them into our community and get them plugged in with any resources they need. Just spend time listening and be in an affirming, safe place. You don’t have to say anything grand: a great thing to hear when you’re conceived is, ‘I’m so glad you’re born, I’m so glad you’re here, I’m thankful for your life’, things like that, and for moms that are pregnant, and just let them know that God has a purpose for them and for their child and that they’re so dearly loved. God doesn’t make throw away people, we all have a reason to be here, but just listen, use those kind words of life, and please stop making those rape exceptions.
Abigail: Yes, wonderful! Well, thanks so much Paula. Again, Paula Peyton from ‘Hope After Rape Conception’. Thanks so much!
Paula: Thanks for having me!
You’ve been listening to ‘I Choose Life!’. If you have questions or if you would like to support the fight for life, please call 260-471-1849, or go to ichooselife.org, because without the Right to Life, no other rights matter!
