Kelly Lester was about four years old when her mother walked into her bedroom to see her playing with a doll in a sexually inappropriate way. She had been a victim of child molestation, setting the stage for a lifestyle of sexual promiscuity, drug abuse, and domestic violence. That childhood trauma would lead Lester down a path that would include four abortions until, she said, she would finally yield to a loving God, allowing Him to put the pieces of her broken life back together.
“For most of my life I lived with shame and insecurities,” Lester told Live Action News. “I came from an upper-middle-class home that seemed picture perfect. When my mom saw what I was doing that day, I was so ashamed, though she never pursued it.”
In elementary school, Lester was mercilessly bullied, further deepening her insecurities. In high school, those same classmates now wanted to be her friends. But they would lead her down the wrong path.
“One night, I snuck out with my new friends to attend a party,” Lester said. “I really wanted to fit in, so I went along with the group. A popular guy asked me to go for a walk and then started kissing me, then he raped me.”
Lester told her friends, but they didn’t believe such a sought-after guy would need to force himself on an unwilling girl.
Desperate for support, Lester told her youth pastor, only to be chastised for attending the party.
Driven by a need to be accepted, Lester became sexually active. At 15, she was pregnant. She told her boyfriend’s mother who arranged for Lester to have an abortion.
“I knew in my heart I was choosing to end a life,” she said. “But I wanted to go to college, I was an honor student and a tennis player. My boyfriend’s mother, ironically, the epitome of an upstanding, church-going woman, was going to take me and pay for it.”
The day she entered the abortion facility would change the trajectory of her life.
“I felt God would never forgive me for what I had done,” Lester said. “So, I started using drugs, alcohol, sex, anything to cover up feelings of unworthiness. I dabbled in homosexuality and even ran drugs for the Puerto Rican mafia.”
But she got tired of all the chaos she was immersed in. She couldn’t take seeing one more friend die of a drug overdose.
Lured to work in the abortion industry by a false belief she was helping women
Lester began looking for a stable job. “I didn’t have a degree or much experience but thought I could work as a receptionist,” she said.
She secured an interview with a women’s facility and was stunned when she drove into the parking lot to see the same building where she had her first surgical abortion. She sat in her car wondering what to do.
“I kept thinking this place had helped me when I was desperate, so I wanted to help other women,” she said.
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By this time, Lester had had a second abortion at another facility with the abortion pill. She explained, “It was very traumatic, I really thought I was going to die. I wasn’t told what to expect and I certainly wasn’t prepared to decide whether to flush my baby down the toilet. I was sedated during my first abortion and felt this clinic had treated me well, so I was justified in taking the job.”
The position paid well, which also attracted Lester. Yet she would soon see the underhanded tactics the abortion business used to coerce women into having abortions.
“If women came in with their boyfriends, we would turn up the heat or air conditioning, bring the girl back to the exam room and wait for the boyfriend to leave,” Lester said. “Then we’d point out how he just left her there to face the abortion alone. We would never allow women to change their minds.”
Using dirty ploys didn’t bother Lester, but she decided to move on when she saw how many women in the recovery room were hemorrhaging from the botched abortions.
“We would take them back to the exam room, fix whatever problem we caused, then release them without telling them what had gone wrong. That troubled me, so I left,” she said.
She continued using drugs, had two more abortions, and was involved with abusive men.
“I was living for myself,” Lester said. “I’d make excuses like I didn’t want to bring a child into an abusive relationship or have a drug-addicted baby. But after each abortion, I sunk into a drug-fueled black hole.”
God-given direction turned her life around
One night, Lester and her live-in boyfriend went out to dinner for a celebration. When they arrived home, a violent argument erupted, and the two wrestled, breaking the door frame.
“There I was lying battered and bleeding on the floor, my boyfriend about to hit me with a piece of splintered wood when he just stopped,” she said.
Soon after, Lester fled to Virginia to be with her father who told her he’d awoken that night to a vision of her being beaten and had prayed for her.
Days later, sitting in the church her father pastored, Lester heard God ask her: “Have you had enough?”
Through the grace of God, she began to realize her life had value. She took a job at a pregnancy support center and in January 2019, attended the March for Life in Washington, D.C.
“I gave my testimony with Silent No More on the steps of the Supreme Court building,” Lester said. “But I left out the part of working previously in the abortion industry.”
When the movie “Unplanned” debuted, Lester hosted a film fundraiser at a theatre.
“I thought, this is me. But I have never gotten healing in this area,” she said.
In January 2020, she became a client of the And Then There Were None ministry founded by former abortion worker Abby Johnson. The organization aids abortion workers in exiting the industry. In April, Lester volunteered for the affiliated ProLove Ministries. In October, she went to her first healing retreat, at which she met Johnson, who urged her to travel and tell her story. Since February 2021, Lester has been on staff with And Then There Were None.
Now a mother of six children, Lester had asked God how He could give her beauty for ashes.
“But my question went unanswered,” Lester said. “Now, I see that by traveling and sharing my story, He is bringing something good out of the bad.”
