In a video for Live Action, Robyn McLean recently shared her story of domestic abuse survival and the healing she found through pregnancy and motherhood after she became pregnant from rape.
McLean explained that when she first met “Zack” he was “charming and “chivalrous.” But within a few months, he became controlling and abusive. She was a junior in college when he began beating her. Though he convinced her that he was only angry because they weren’t engaged, things didn’t change once they were engaged and McLean tried to break it off. She told him she didn’t want to be having sex until they were married, and that was the day he first raped her.
“It wasn’t the end of it,” she explained. “He said, ‘If you won’t give it to me, I’ll take it from you.’ And from then on, he continued to rape me.”
McLean began contemplating suicide. She explained, “I remember one day taking a blade to my chest and holding it there, and I just thought, ‘This could end.’ What stopped me from going through with the suicide was finding out I was pregnant. It was no longer about planning my suicide, but instead planning for my baby’s future.”
McLean says Zack took McLean to a field when she was three months pregnant and told her to fight him. She curled up into the fetal position and protected her stomach while he beat her. Two weeks later she felt forced to marry him, later learning that he had hoped to kill her baby that night in the field. But thanks to her actions to protect her baby, he survived.
The night McLean gave birth to her son AJ — with Zack not present — all she could think about was how much she loved AJ. “I just saw his precious face and everything else that I had been feeling just melted away….”
The abuse, however, continued, and one night while Zack was working an overnight shift, McLean called her father and finally told him about the abuse. She packed up her things and she and AJ left her abuser.
From there, McLean began to put her life back together. She prayed to God for a father for her son, and she soon met the man she would marry two years after finally finding the strength to leave her abuser. Her abuser relinquished his parental rights and McLean’s husband was able to adopt AJ. The couple then had a daughter together.
Though she knows abortion could have been a part of her story, McLean is so thankful that it wasn’t. She knows that so many women in her situation might feel pressure to abort.
“For the women that fear that their child is going to be a constant reminder of what happened, for me, my son is completely who he is,” she explained. “When I look at him, that’s what I see and that’s what I think of. God is the only one that can heal any situation and I pray that there’s healing for you and any decision that you’ve ever made that has felt like a domino effect from another. More than anything, I want you to know how much God loves you.”
For more details of Robyn McLean’s story, you can read her essay here at Live Action News.
