Pro-life advocate Steventhen Holland recently sat down with Live Action founder and president Lila Rose in an exclusive interview during which he shared more of his story, including how his mother, who lived with intellectual challenges, became pregnant with him through rape.
At age eight, after some other children told him he was “the wrong color,” Steventhen went home and asked his mother about it. That’s when he learned he was adopted as an infant.
“That’s pretty heavy for an eight-year-old little boy to find out and I’m trying to process that and I knew I was loved. I’d never questioned that, but the biggest ‘why’ question that I had, that I would carry for a long time was why would my mom, why would my birth mom not want me?” he told Rose.
At age 27, that question still lingered. Now married and having experienced two miscarriages and the birth of one child, he and his wife were expecting again when he felt God tell him it was time to look for his birth mom. He had held on to the paperwork he was given at age 8 and dug it out of a box. He began googling and was able to find his birth uncle.
After flying to meet his uncle, Steventhen learned about his birth mother, Glenda Sue.
“He shares with me in over two days how I came to be that I didn’t know and what I found out was there were six siblings. He’s one of six… their parents had actually died at an early age and they were all thrown into orphanages and none of them ever got adopted out. Some of them were in and out of foster care but a lot of people didn’t want them because he’s the only one out of the six that wasn’t mentally challenged,” he explained.
Steventhen’s birth mother only “functions as an 11-year-old” intellectually, he said. At age 18, she became a ward of the state and was placed in a facility for people with intellectual disabilities. It was while she was living there that she was raped by five men. She had no money, no job, no resources and, she didn’t tell anyone what had happened to her. When facility employees noticed that she was pregnant, they pressured her to abort her baby.
“Despite what everybody else thought — and they thought that I wasn’t worthy, she did. So she carried me homeless for the duration of the pregnancy, ran away from the facility. And nine months pregnant, by the end of the pregnancy, she’s living in a cardboard box behind a grocery store in this little town called Whitwell, Tennessee,” said Steventhen.
It was there that a 16-year-old boy found Glenda Sue and brought her home to his family. His parents took care of Glenda Sue until she gave birth two weeks later.
“And everybody wants to know who names their kid Steventhen?” he said. “My hero does. She said, ‘I want to name him Steven then William….'” Steven, is her brother, the one that would eventually connect Steventhen and Glenda Sue nearly thirty years later, and William was her father, Steventhen’s grandfather. But because she had difficulty speaking clearly, the person in the hospital wrote down “Steventhen William.”
The family who was caring for Glenda Sue snuck her and Steventhen out of the hospital to avoid him being taken from her, but when they noticed that she was unable to properly care for him, he was placed for adoption.
After hearing this story about his mother, Steventhen and his uncle drove the next day to meet Glenda Sue. As soon as she was told who he was, she threw her arms around him and told him how much she loved him and missed him.
“She loved me so much. She fought for me even when the whole world was saying I wasn’t worth it,” he said. “I was to her.”
Watch the full interview here.
Tell President Trump, RFK, Jr., Elon, and Vivek:
Stop killing America’s future. Defund Planned Parenthood NOW!
