Editor’s Note: Live Action works to maintain the highest standards of journalistic integrity. Live Action has looked into key elements of Ms. Christie’s testimony and personal story and has found them to be credible.
Jennifer Christie was raped while on a business trip and fought for her life to survive. Shortly thereafter, she learned she was pregnant as a result. In a recent speech at Malta’s March for Life 2018, she said people are under very wrong impressions about women who become pregnant as a result of rape, and about their children conceived in rape. “People will tell you that a raped woman who conceives will feel rage and anger and disgust toward her baby. And I’ve spoken to hundreds and hundreds of women, and that is just not true.”
In the video below, posted in early December 2018 by the Life Network Foundation Malta, Christie speaks with her husband, Jeff, at her side. She tells of how she had to break the news of her pregnancy to him six weeks after the rape. She saw an ultrasound, and it changed everything. “I saw a little dot, and it flickered… and I knew what that was. And for the first time since I had been raped, I felt that light inside me again. And I smiled, because that little flicker on the screen, to me, was hope and joy and light.”
“At a moment where everything was so dark and so painful, I remember thinking that I couldn’t protect myself. I fought and I tried, but I couldn’t. But on that screen there, that little guy blinking at me with that tiny, tiny heart — him, I could protect. I called my husband and I said ‘Are you sitting down? I’m pregnant.’ … He said, ‘This baby is something beautiful from something so terrible and painful.’… He said, ‘We can do this.’ And I said, ‘Ok, we can do this.'”
READ: Defeating five lies forced on women who become pregnant from rape
She went on to say that she and her husband felt great pressure from the medical community to abort:
We had so many doctors and nurses tell us, “You do not want this. You do not want a child from rape. You will always have this reminder hanging over your head, this reminder — if you keep it –” And they say ‘it,’ they don’t call it a child because then it’s real. They don’t wanna make it real. “If you keep it you will never be able to move on, you will never be able to forget.”
Guess what? No woman is ever gonna forget what happened to her. Whether she has the baby or doesn’t… you are changed forever and that’s just a fact. But it doesn’t mean that you can’t become a better person than you were before.
Christie says that her son is, indeed, a reminder to her that she was raped, but not in the way many might think. “[He] is very much a reminder to me of what God can do from the darkness — the beauty that He can bring from brokenness. He is a reminder that good can come from evil every time. He is a reminder that love is always stronger than hate…. He is a reminder that who we become as human beings is not determined by how we start.”
Watch Jeff and Jennifer’s remarks in full here.
