One Woman’s Choice: Pregnancy as Test of Faith

Two weeks ago, I wrote a column about women who were preparing themselves for the possibility that abortion will again be severely restricted or outlawed in the United States. Using a simple homemade device, they perform abortions on each other in small underground groups and without a physician.

This idea unnerved many readers, a reaction that I had anticipated. But I hadn’t expected to hear from someone like Theresa. When she called after reading this particular column, she wasn’t angry, nor did she offer any false piety.

She wanted to tell me a story, about herself, that only those very close to her know. Three of her four children are still too immature to understand it, so she will wait to tell them. But Theresa thought it was time to tell me.

When I arrived at Theresa’s home in Huntington Beach, she had already assembled photographs, birth certificates and a few other mementos that would illustrate, and corroborate, her words. She was uneasy at first, nervous that her meaning might be mangled by someone who does not see the world through the same lens.

Her husband, she said, was even more apprehensive, so we agreed to use a pseudonym, one that she chose herself--Theresa of Avila is her favorite saint.

This is a story about abortion, but it is also, overwhelmingly, a story about faith. The strength of Theresa’s faith, in God and in the Roman Catholic Church, has touched many lives. Now those lives include my own.

Theresa, now a 38-year old interior designer, was a student at a girls’ Catholic high school in San Pedro when she met her future husband at the Lucky supermarket where they both worked part time.

As Theresa tells it, it was almost love at first sight. They were both 16 years old; she, from a working-class family of eight children; he, much more wealthy, the younger of two sons.

This boy, like Theresa, a Catholic, would become her first, and only, lover. Within two years, despite the objections of his family, the two were engaged to be married. He bought her an engagement ring at the Broadway, and later, he gave her a hope chest. In a year they had planned to become husband and wife.

But a few months after graduating from high school, when she was working as a phone company operator, Theresa became pregnant. She hadn’t used birth control--it never came up--and to Theresa in particular, to do so would have represented premeditated sin.

“It always bothered me, having sex with him,” Theresa tells me. “I knew it was offensive to God and that it was a disappointment to the expectations that my parents had of me. . . . And we got caught. We were just being human.”

When Theresa told her fiance that she suspected that she was pregnant, he was overjoyed. He rented an apartment, furnished it, and scrapped plans for a large church wedding in favor of a quick oath at City Hall.

“But I felt like a frightened deer,” Theresa says. “I was paralyzed. He just took charge, and I went along.”

Her parents had no clue as to the real reason behind the rush--it would be almost five months before they would find out. By then, what seemed like another disaster had befallen Theresa.

When she was eight weeks along in her pregnancy--during a critical time for the baby’s development--she came down with German measles.

Although this was in early 1970, three years before the U.S. Supreme Court would legalize abortion nationwide, abortion was legally available in California to women who were believed to be carrying severely deformed fetuses.

But Theresa, who had waited until the fifth month of pregnancy before seeking prenatal care, really had no conception of what German measles might mean to her, to her child, or to their future.

“My brother’s girlfriend worked for” an obstetrician-gynecologist, Theresa says. “I went to see him. He was very kind, very nice. . . . I remember he said, ‘Hop up, Rosebud. I want to see what’s in your stomach.’ I didn’t feel like a rosebud. All of this was so shameful. It was like a black cloud had come over my life.”

Then the doctor told Theresa what she could expect should she decide to have the baby, which he strongly advised against. “He told me that last year he had delivered a baby whose mother had come in contact with someone who had German measles.

“The baby was born deaf . . . retarded, with its intestines outside its body. And this woman hadn’t even had measles herself. . . . The doctor told me that my baby would be a vegetable, or worse. And he said that if, by some chance, this wasn’t apparent at birth, then by age 5, something devasting would show up.”

Theresa left the doctor’s office almost in a trance. But she did not waver in her decision to bear her child. Her faith, she says, was in God.

“I knew that baby had a soul,” Theresa tells me, looking straight into my eyes, “and I couldn’t destroy it.”

Theresa then made another crucial decision--not to marry the man she loved. She didn’t want to burden him with a marriage he might not have wanted, nor did she want to live with her own doubts.

When he showed up at her door, flowers in hand, to take her to City Hall to be wed, Theresa handed him her engagement ring and told him she just couldn’t go. He left, finally. Both of them were in tears.

“It killed me. It just killed me,” Theresa says. “But I saw what I was doing to him as a supreme act of love.”

Within a matter of days, Theresa left for St. Anne’s Maternity Home in Los Angeles, where she would spend the last months of her pregnancy.

Although her own parents, especially her father, were devastated by their daughter’s pregnancy, they agreed that abortion was out of the question. Her father told the same thing to the parents of Theresa’s former fiance when they had argued that an abortion must be performed.

During those months at St. Anne’s--”the most peaceful time of my life”-- Theresa says, she found an inner strength that came from turning her fate completely over to God.

Although her former fiance continued to visit her, begging her to marry him, Theresa stood firm. Near the end of her stay, he had stopped coming by. On the day she went into labor, which was hard and long, Theresa was alone.

Then, moments after the birth, the delivering obstetrician said to her, in what was more of a scolding than a question, “Weren’t you advised to get an abortion?”

Theresa said that she had been.

“Well, you should have,” the man shot back.

Theresa’s son was not breathing, and she had only had a moment to catch a glimpse of his curly dark hair before he was whisked out of the delivery room. His Apgar score, a measure of the vital signs of a newborn, was 4 out of a possible 10. A score greater than 7 signifies good health. Although there were no visible signs of a handicap, he tested positive for measles. Because his condition was highly contagious, he was taken by ambulance to an isolation ward at USC Medical Center.

By this time, Theresa had decided to give up her child for adoption and had signed the preliminary papers.

On the advice of a social worker, she specified only that the baby be raised in a Catholic home. She realized that her child, sure to be handicapped, would have a difficult time finding someone to love him.

A few days after the birth, Theresa’s boyfriend came to St. Anne’s to pick her up. She asked him if they could stop by USC, in hopes of seeing their son. They found him completely alone, wailing, behind a glass wall.

“I remember looking at him, watching him cry,” Theresa says. “And I felt this maternal instinct, so strong. I remember thinking, ‘I have to take care of this baby.’ The whole ride home I was sobbing. And I remember that song by Diana Ross ‘Ain’t No Mountain High Enough’ was playing on the radio. I listened to the words. . . . That’s when all of it started coming together.”

Within seven days of that ride home from the hospital, Theresa changed the course of her life and that of those around her. She asked her boyfriend to marry her--pleaded with him, really--and he did. He hurriedly rented an apartment in Long Beach, where he was attending college, and got a part-time job.

The newlyweds reclaimed their child from a foster mother, an older woman chosen to care for the baby because there was no danger that she would pass on the measles herself.

“Baby has shaking of arms and legs,” read a note that the foster mother handed Theresa on the day she went to pick up the boy. “Do not be alarmed. Just hold close and talk to him.”

Theresa kept her son in isolation for a year on her doctor’s advice--”As far as I’m concerned, you should take that child and lock him in a closet for a year,” is what he told her.

And today, that baby is a 19-year-old man.

His mother says that not only was he normal--”until he was 5, I just kept waiting for something to happen”--but also that his IQ tests show him in the range of 150. She describes him as the most spiritual person she has ever met.

This summer, the man that Theresa calls just one of God’s miracles entered the seminary to become a Catholic priest.