I’m repeating myself, but you cannot fix the crime of rape by committing a follow on crime of murder.
Good evening committee members.
My name is Jennifer Christie,
Four years ago, I was brutally attacked in a hotel room – beaten, tortured, and raped . . . my body thrown in a stairwell.
I’m not here tonight to represent crime victims. I’m here tonight to represent the 32,000 women a year who become pregnant after rape and the 75% of us who give our children life.
I’m part of a global organization called Save The 1. Save The 1 is mothers from rape, adult children who are conceived in rape. And it’s this people group who I’m talking about — the conceived in rape who are targeted, it seems, for eradication. This doesn’t make sense to me because the Supreme Court already decided that for a rapist to be punished with death is considered cruel and unusual punishment and yet somehow . . . somehow, we’re okay with killing the children — who were not even in existence at the time the crime was committed.
I’m here tonight to bear witness to the lies that I heard and the lies that I was told: that if you just abort, everything will be okay and you’ll forget. If you just abort, then you can move on. There is no forgetting. No woman is ever going to forget what happened to her. I’ve been told so many times that ‘if you’d just had an abortion, you wouldn’t always have this reminder hanging over your head.’ This ‘reminder’….
Is my son a reminder? He absolutely is! He’s a reminder everyday that as women, we can rise above our circumstances. He’s a reminder that love is always stronger than hate, and who we are as human beings is not determined by how we were conceived.
A woman at her most broken needs hope and help and love and people rallying around here. She does not need violence on top of violence, tragedy on top of tragedy.
I’m here tonight, one woman, but I speak for most of us when I say, stop calling my son a ‘rapist’s child’! Stop calling him ‘evil seed’ and ‘child of the devil’, he is MY son. And he has a right to be here. Do NOT use me and my rape and my story and the story of all of us mothers from rape who love our children as a banner — as a banner to hide behind and excuse the genocide of the innocent! We love our children.
The first time I saw my son’s heartbeat was on an ultrasound. It’s the same heartbeat that beats in his three year old body today. He’s an exceptional child, but he is NOT an exception!
I beg you to think of this: the heart that beats in my son? The heart that beat in him at four weeks, is the heart that beats in him at three, it’s the heart that will beat in him at thirty. It loves and it hurts and it feels just like mine and just like yours. I beg you not to stop it.
My son, conceived in rape, is a reminder that love is stronger than hate
( Save The 1) “You can never make me regret my abortion” – the sign was small and unobtrusive. It was written on vanilla construction paper – the kind that kindergartners use to practice writing their names on in sprawling and uncertain letters. I almost expected the “R” in “regret” to be printed backwards.