by Mary Rose, Assistant Campus Outreach Director

We were at UCSD, and the day had been rough, with both administration and students hassling us, but this came as a highlight -- this story is one of my favorites of the semester.

“Thank you. You’re doing the most important work there is: You’re saving lives. And...this is the first time I’ve told my story--”   

    The woman approached me at the table almost tentatively, but after asking just a few questions about what we did and what the response had been from the students so far, she suddenly opened up and told her story.  “I was an undergraduate here when I got pregnant.  I was walking on this same campus. You know, ‘What am I going to do? the whole world is going to think I’m horrible.’ But, forget it!  And I walked around this campus pregnant and everyone looked at me and laughed at me."

She was eighteen, a student at UC San Diego, when she found out she was pregnant.  As the baby inside of her grew, her fellow students laughed at her pregnant belly.  Unmarried girls simply did not give birth.  They had abortions instead.  

But she allowed her son to live.  

She never even considered having him killed.  Her parents told her that they would be happy to help her.  She considered everything and realized that the best life she could give her son would be a life with a mother and a father.  She placed her son for adoption.  In her letter to her baby, she wrote: “It’s not like I didn’t want you. I wanted nothing more than to be your mother. But I loved you so much I gave you to two parents.”

    This brave woman went on to earn her doctorate degree at Stanford.  While at Stanford, she was appalled to see that the “options” offered to pregnant students from the health office was a list of abortion clinics.  She started a program to support pregnant student mothers.  

    That was over thirty years ago.  Just recently she met her son.  She told me, “I got a doctorate and was a professor for twenty years and all that;  but the most important thing I did with my life was have a baby - bring a life into the world.”  That is the pinnacle of her life.

 "Adoption is such an easy, good option.”  But how many women are given that option? So much for choice.  Standing on one of the same walkways that she had walked as a pregnant student, she got to tell me his story for the first time. She had held it in her heart for that long. 

Before she left, she asked if we could use her story.  Now that she has told it once, she wants to tell it again. 

How are you making life more  available in your community?  Women don't want abortion. This woman was strong enough to go against the enormous tide sweeping her, and her baby, towards death.  But the pressure is intense to submit to the Culture of Death. 

 "Thank you..." she told me -- because I, and the Campus Outreach Team, are supporting women by exposing the truth about abortion, and offering help. We're saving lives.