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Editor’s note: This week was the 44th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the  U.S. Supreme Court decision that allows a mother to have her preborn baby legally killed by abortion. We also witnessed a ‘March for Women’ event in the US Capitol where hundreds of thousands of women demonstrated to have that option to kill their offspring protected. To bring some light into this darkness, LifeSiteNews brings you this true story of a scared and broken young woman who learned the joy of saying ‘Yes’ to life despite the hardships. Names and places have been changed — except Michael Hichborn’s — to safeguard the individuals’ identity. 

January 27, 2017 (LifeSiteNews) — It was a cold frosty Canadian evening in December. Twenty-year-old Christina Woods had just finished spending a few restful moments in prayer in a nearby church. Bundled in a heavy parka, she was now trudging along the snow-swept sidewalk as she made her way home. Christina did not know it, but at that very moment she was being stalked by her ex-boyfriend. He had been furious with her for not going along with his plan to end the pregnancy. Her refusal was ruining his life. He vowed that this time, nothing would hold him back from making her see things his way. 

Christina had stopped at a store to pick up some groceries. It was when she was heading across a dark corner of the store’s parking lot with her hands full of grocery bags that her ex-boyfriend decided to confront her. 

“Look what you’ve done to my life,” he shouted at her. “If you’d gone along with our original plan to end the pregnancy, we’d both still be in college and have our lives before us. But you had to go and do things your way. You’ve made everything go wrong. Fix this by going along with our original plan,” he pleaded angrily. 

Christina had stopped to listen to him. But when he had suggested again that she have an abortion, she quietly told him ‘no’ and turned to continue on her way. 

But the young man approached her aggressively, grabbing onto her parka. 

“What do you mean ‘no,’” he thundered angrily. “I’ll show you ‘no.’”

With that, he threw some savage punches at Christina’s face. She dropped the grocery bags too late to protect herself from the blows he rained upon her that cracked a tooth and bruised an eye. The ex-boyfriend, realizing what he had done, fled the scene, leaving his former girlfriend weeping, dazed, and bleeding in the snowy parking lot. 

“He was furious at me for deciding to keep the baby,” Christina told LifeSiteNews in an exclusive interview. 

“He hated that I had taken charge and started making decisions for myself and the baby. He told me that he was the victim because he didn't have any other alternative but to go along with my plans. He complained that his life was changed because of my decision. He was very angry about that. He accused me of harming his relationship with his parents,” she said. 

Standing abused and broken in that bitterly cold parking lot, Christina now felt more terrified, miserable, and lonely than ever. What was to become of her and her baby that she had been carrying now for 19 weeks. How was it that the grand adventure of attending college as a freshman months earlier had come to this? 

The sad chain of events marched painfully through her memory. 

Christina had been given the opportunity early that year in 2014 to attend a Christian college in the U.S. along with a young man from her Reformed Church community. Both had grown up in what she called “fairly strict” families where faith, hard work, and living life according to God’s ways were central. 

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Christina felt overwhelmed by the gravity of the situation.

“We were both raised in very pro-life homes,” she said. 

The pair had travelled together from Calgary to the college, where, facing an unfamiliar environment filled with many strange faces, they found themselves gravitating toward each other. They began to spend exclusive time with one another. 

“We had both grown up in active caring families. We now found ourselves on a new scene where we were desperately lonely. And we grew up rather sheltered. All the checks and balances we had from our parents and our community were gone. We had no accountability,” Christina said. 

With those checks and balances now gone, the pair started making what Christina now calls “poor choices.”

“We knew that we were making the wrong decisions at the time. And we had been given so much support to make the right choices, such as having a grounded upbringing, great parents, and being at a college where sex was valued as belonging exclusively to marriage,” she said. 

Christina recounted how she and her boyfriend were “shocked” one day to discover she was pregnant. 

“We were the most shocked people on earth. It had truly never occurred to me that this could happen to me. I was just illogical about the whole thing,” she said. 

Because of the college’s code of conduct which punished with expulsion men and women found to be engaging in sexual activity, the boyfriend told Christina it would be “disloyal” of her to him if the pregnancy revealed their misconduct and caused him to be kicked out. 

“He was unrelenting that abortion was the best possible outcome,” she said. 

Christina felt overwhelmed by the gravity of the situation. She felt like she was being pulled in different directions. On some days she wished she would have a natural miscarriage. On other days she felt like her boyfriend was right and abortion was the “best thing to do.” But then there were the days where she felt that abortion was the “wrong thing to do,” and she pondered on the new life that was beginning to stir inside her. 

On top of all of this, Christina was paralyzed at the thought of her secret escaping and being discovered by her family back at home, especially by her father, whom she did not want to disappoint. No matter how many different scenarios she played in her head, she inevitably saw herself ending up alone and unloved, either losing her dad and her family, or her boyfriend, or everyone. 

“It was unbearable for me at the time,” she said. 

Glimmer of hope

Having no support and looking for answers, Christina turned to Facebook and a few online blogs, desperate to find something, anything, that would offer her a perspective other than abortion. She didn’t know exactly what she was looking for, but she was searching for a glimmer of hope. A pro-life article posted on Facebook caught her eye. She reached out to the poster, hoping for some guidance. Who she unknowingly reached out to was Michael Hichborn, a well-known U.S. Catholic writer, researcher, and the president of the Lepanto Institute. He immediately responded to her message. 

“Christina contacted me out of the blue because she needed to talk to someone who was pro-life, but not someone who knew her. She was afraid, a freshman in college, and pregnant,” Hichborn told LifeSiteNews. 

Hichborn encouraged Christina to think about her situation from the perspective of her baby. He told her that the baby depended on her to be strong. He said that she was the one, not anybody else, who right now had to make good choices for herself and her baby.

“I encouraged her to return home and to talk to her parents about what had happened. She asked me to pray for her, and my entire family did,” he said. 

Hichborn’s advice gave Christina the hope she had been searching for. It was at the end of November that she worked up the courage to quietly leave college and return home. She did not formally checkout from school, nor did she tell her boyfriend of her plans. She simply left. 

“I thought if I told my boyfriend what I was doing, he would try to stop me. I wasn’t in a place emotionally where I would be able to resist him if he had tried to stop me,” she said. 

Breaking the news of her pregnancy to her parents was as difficult as Christina imagined it would be, but it was her mother who took the news the hardest. 

“It was really humiliating for my mother to find her daughter pregnant. She was sure that everyone in the community would judge her for it and whisper about it behind her back,” she said. 

“But with my dad it was very different. He struggled knowing that I had considered aborting his only grandchild. He had a lot of difficulty wondering why it would not have been instinctive for me to call him,” she added. 

High emotions and a great deal of stress while living back at home now became Christina’s constant companions. Added to this was the guilt she experienced from having been sexually active and from having contemplated abortion. She struggled with tensions at home caused largely by her mother, but she was heartened to see her relationship with her Dad blossom. Throughout all of this, she was beginning to fall more and more in love with the little baby that was growing inside her. 

Plugged-in 

Around this time Christina’s dad had hired an electrician named Joseph, a serious-minded Catholic, to help with renovations in the family-run business. Because of tensions at home with her mom, Christina would often spend her days in her father’s workshop, where she listened to her dad and Joseph passionately discuss their religious convictions. She found this remarkable since her dad was very set in his Reformed ways and did not like to discuss other religious perspectives differing from his own. 

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'When I went into the Catholic Church...I just felt there was something holy and sacred, a powerful presence that I had never experienced in my own church.'

“I could hardly believe he was letting a Catholic person basically preach to him since he was extremely comfortable with what he believed,” she said. 

As the days went by, Christina noticed that Joseph appeared to have other interests than simply defending his Catholic faith. 

“He started spending more time working with my father, mostly I think because he liked my dad, and he liked my family, and because I suspected that he was beginning to like me,” she said. 

As Joseph’s intentions became clearer — and with the dad’s blessing — Christina and Joseph’s relationship blossomed quickly. They soon became engaged. 

About this same time, Christina’s mother had become so embarrassed at having her unmarried pregnant daughter attend church services, that she made it known that it would be best if Christina simply stayed home. To appease her mother, Christina agreed, even though she knew that she would sorely miss the spiritual nourishment she received there. 

Hearing her struggle over this during a Facebook chat, Christina’s U.S. friend Michael Hichborn encouraged her to stay close to God, despite not attending church. To give her some spiritual support, he mailed CDs of talks by Catholic apologist Venerable Archbishop Fulton Sheen, including his famous 50-part Catechism. 

“She listened to the whole thing in short order, which led to an explosion of questions,” Hichborn said. 

What intrigued Christina most in the talks was the Catholic understanding of Jesus being truly present — body, blood, soul, and divinity — in the bread and wine consecrated by a priest at Mass. Her Reformed upbringing had taught her that the bread and wine were only a symbol of Jesus, not really Jesus himself. She became curious about what it would be like to experience this mysterious presence of Jesus in the consecrated bread and wine. 

She wondered if Jesus’ words could literally be true when he said that “unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood, you have no life in you.” She decided on a whim one Sunday to attend a Catholic service. She reasoned that even if it proved to be a disappointment, she would still be able to get out of the house and away from her mother and the tension.  

But Christina was not disappointed. 

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Christina began attending the Catholic practice of Eucharistic adoration.

“When I went into the Catholic Church, I just felt there was something different. I just felt there was something holy and sacred, a powerful presence that I had never experienced in my own church,” she said. 

Christina remembers suddenly being hit with the thought that if the Catholic teaching on the real presence of Jesus in the consecrated bread were actually true, then, she was missing out on something, someone, extraordinarily important. 

She began to attend the Catholic mass more regularly. The more she experienced coming into the presence of the consecrated bread — the Eucharist — reserved in the tabernacle in the Catholic Church, the more she came to believe that Jesus was truly present in that bread.

“When I experienced the Eucharist, I just felt that here was something holy,” she said. 

Christina now found herself desiring to spend time with Jesus in the Eucharist. She began attending the Catholic practice of Eucharistic adoration, where Jesus is exposed in a vessel called a monstrance so that people can come close to him and pray. She also began attending daily Mass. She found being in the presence of Jesus gave her an unworldly peace and strength that enabled her to face her daily struggles. 

“On very difficult days, where it was hard to get through the day or hard to have a perspective, turning to the Eucharist, especially in adoration, helped me get through. I just got strength and focus. It really helped me, in ways that I cannot explain, to get through that time,” she said. 

As Christina prayed before Jesus, she began to find that there was more to her life than the current sum of all her troubles and sorrows. She unexpectedly rediscovered joy.

“I now knew with Jesus’ help that I would get through my pregnancy, but I did not know that I would find joy. Jesus in the Eucharist helped me find new joy,” she said. 

It was when Christina was returning from one of her visits to Jesus in adoration that her boyfriend had violently attacked her in the store parking lot. He had left the college knowing that his misconduct had come to light and he was about to be expelled. Having no place to go, he had returned home. Christina reported him to the police and a restraining order was placed on him. 

Greatest joy

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When Christina held Rachael for the first time, she was overwhelmed with joy.

Christina kept in touch with her pro-life friend Hichborn on Facebook throughout the early months of 2015, often asking him questions about the Catholic Faith. He was gladdened to hear of her love for Jesus in the Eucharist. He encouraged her to attend a local “Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults” (RCIA) class where she might find in-depth answers to her questions. Christina found that the more she learned at the classes, the more her relationship with the Eucharistic Jesus deepened. 

It was in April, very close to the baby’s due date, that Christina experienced an overwhelming sense that Jesus was calling her to deepen her relationship with him in the Catholic faith. This happened during Mass on Divine Mercy Sunday, a day where Catholics celebrate the mercy of God so lavishly poured out on anyone, especially the downtrodden and the broken, who asks for it. 

As Christina prayed before the presence of Jesus in the Eucharist, tears began flowing freely down her face, though she did not understand why. All she knew was that something profound had happened to her in her heart of hearts. She knew she had been given the strength to follow Jesus wherever he asked her to go, even if that meant leaving her former beliefs behind. 

The day of the birth was now fast approaching. Christina asked her dad if he would be present at the birth, and he agreed. Their relationship had grown stronger than ever before. He was looking forward to meeting his first grandchild. 

“I think what stood out to me most about the birth was how much this meant for my dad. I don’t think I ever saw him cry in my entire childhood. But he cried a lot when his granddaughter was born,” she said. 

Christina named her daughter Rachael. 

“Rachael was the greatest joy of my dad’s life,” she said. “She went from being a person that I thought might disrupt his life to being the most important person in his life.”

And when Christina held Rachael for the first time, she was overwhelmed with joy. She was so glad that she had not listened to her boyfriend’s advice to abort. She was grateful for the support she had found. 

“I was so eager to meet her. I had fallen completely in love with her when I was pregnant. I was not surprised to find out how much I loved her when I held her for the first time,” she said, adding: “It is so hard for me to imagine that there was a time when I thought about not having her. She has meant everything to me.” 

While Christina herself had not yet become Catholic, she wanted her daughter to be baptized in the Catholic faith as soon as possible. 

“It meant so much to me to have my own daughter baptized — probably more than my own conversion — because it is my duty in life to give her everything I can in terms of faith, and to raise her so that she goes to heaven,” she said. 

The local parish priest agreed to make an exception of allowing a child of a non-Catholic parent to be baptized, knowing that once Christina finished her RCIA class, she would become Catholic as well. 

Christina entered the Catholic Church in June of 2015 after making her first confession, where she brought to God all of her past mistakes and received forgiveness. With her soul now cleansed and made holy, she anticipated receiving Jesus in Holy Communion for the first time. It was an experience she will never forget. 

“It meant a lot to me to receive the Eucharist. Taking the Eucharist was really important to me. I felt like I had met God in a way that I had never met him before, in a way that I hadn't found through the Scriptures, through praise and worship, or through any other means,” she said. 

“When I received Jesus for the first time I felt very humbled, very unworthy of him, not because of what I had done, because of what he had done for me, dying on the cross,” she said.

It was only shortly later that Christina’s newfound faith was sorely tested. One night in September her father had gone to bed with a severe headache. When the family woke up in the morning, they were devastated to find that he had died in his sleep. An autopsy revealed the cause to be a brain aneurism. 

But even in the midst of this tragedy, Christina could see that God was still working. It was because of her pregnancy that she had returned home and had been able to spend such precious time with her father before he died. She had been able to give him his first grandchild before he died and see the joy it brought to him. 

“I’m so thankful that I got to spend time with my father before he passed. If I had been at school and had received a call that he had passed away without me having said goodbye to him, that would have been tragic. As it turned out, I got to spend so much time with him that I wouldn't have had if I hadn't had this pregnancy. I got to spend everyday with him. He was at the birth of my daughter. He had a chance to see me become a mother,” she said. 

Christina believes that her father played no little part in helping the relationship begin between her and Joseph. She wonders if he intuited on some deep level that he had to find her a helpmate, knowing his time on earth was coming to a close. With her father and main supporter now gone, Christina realized that the time was right for her and Joseph to wed. They married in the Catholic Church on November 4, 2015. The couple had a simple ceremony and even simpler celebration afterwards. On the day prior to their wedding, Christina and a few of her Catholic friends prayed for an hour before Jesus in the adoration chapel that he would bless the new couple and help them faithfully live out their vows. 

As Christina now thinks back to the time when she began attending college as a freshmen, she cannot help but marvel at how Jesus was drawing her and her baby to himself at a time when she felt most lonely and thought all was lost. She now sees how God brought good out of evil. The sexual sins she committed with her boyfriend resulted in the gift of Rachael. Those same sins resulted in her rediscovering and deepening her relationship with her father and being close to him in his last days. Those same sins also became the stepping stones of her discovering the real presence of Jesus in the Catholic Church and receiving him in Holy Communion. She marvels at how God sent Joseph into her life to help nurture her newfound Catholic faith and to become a father to Rachael. 

“If it had not been for God working in my life, I would now have nothing, not even my daughter. But with him, I now have everything that matters: My Rachael, my husband, the real presence of Jesus in my life, and an assurance that God is looking after me, despite my own weaknesses and insufficiencies,” she said. “While I despise my sins, I praise God for the unmerited mercies he has shown to me,” she added. 

Christina said her experience has taught her to trust in God, no matter what happens to her.

“I now know that with God, all things are possible. I thank God for his love and his mercy,” she said. 

Epilogue: The ex-boyfriend did not stop harassing Christina, even after she was married. The newly-wed couple moved to another province to become rid of him, but to no avail. The ex-boyfriend eventually became part of court proceedings to gain visiting rights to the child, but the proceedings were halted when he became violent with the child by kicking her carseat in the courtroom. Christina and Joseph welcomed another baby into the world last July. Christina and her mother are now on speaking terms.