I was an abused baby. After my mother had me, she was out on the street. She lived with some man rumored to be a pimp and would leave me alone with him every day. My grandmother’s sister would come by and check on me. She said when she’d get there, I would be crying with a diaper that looked like it had not been changed for hours.
I think I was about 10 months old when the fire happened in 1967. When a group of children playing nearby heard me crying, they called 911. I was found alone by firefighters in a smoldering apartment in Compton, California. The fire department had found me alone and tied with wire by the leg to a vacuum cleaner.
For approximately one month, I was placed in the care of the County of Los Angeles and called, “Jane Doe,” until my identity and my family’s identity could be determined. I was placed with a foster family — the same family into which I would be adopted years later. After about a month, the Sheriff’s department found my family and gave me to my grandmother who said she would care for me, “until my mother got herself together.”
My birth name was Donna Ann Barnes.
I initially found out the history of my early life from my adoptive mom and the court records she had saved. When I was 37 years old, I finally began doing my own research with guidance from my law enforcement coworkers, trips to the Hall of Records and by locating and talking with people from both sides of my family. The most overwhelming news I received during my search was the fact that the mother and grandmother I had fantasized all my life about meeting, had both passed away before I’d even reached my fifth birthday. That really hurt and I mourned my loss even though it had happened so long before.
I was also shocked to learn that my birthmom’s father was her blood related father, not her step-father like I had always believed. This meant that my conception had been the result of my 16-year-old mother’s incestuous rape by her own father (my grandfather.)
My mother Linda shamefully hid her pregnancy for the full 9 month term; her mother did not know she was pregnant until the night she went into the hospital complaining of “stomach pain.” Afraid of her father, she told those around her that she didn’t know who the father was. But at some point, she secretly told her neighbor and my social worker that she had become pregnant by her father. Her mother’s rejection and support of her rapist father devastated her and eventually led to her drug addiction, prostitution, homelessness and death by suicide at age 21.
So the woman who protected her rapist partner and refused to believe her own daughter somehow became my caregiver. A few months after she agreed to do so, my grandmother contacted my social worker, saying that she could no longer take care of me and asked for Social Services to come and pick me up. My grandmother said that because she had also given birth to an infant one month before I was born, she was unable to handle both babies.
However, my foster mom had been told by Social Services that my grandmother no longer wanted me because I reminded her of the fact that her partner — the father of her children — was also the father of her daughter’s child.
It seems my grandmother came around to the realization that her daughter had been telling the truth, but my grandmother coped with it by believing my mother had seduced him. In fact, she had told my foster mom that my mother had disgraced her in front of her entire family.
I ended up in foster care because after I was born, my grandmother sided with my father / grandfather, throwing me and my mother out of their house with his approval. She supported him and his side of the story, fully evidenced by the fact that she not only stayed in a relationship with him, but when I was three years old she married him. I went to the Hall of Records and looked up the marriage certificate myself at age 37. I didn’t think anything else could shock me about the whole drama, until I saw that. It had to have broken my mother’s heart to see how completely she had been abandoned by her own mother.
Inexplicably, my grandmother continued to visit me at the foster home until I was four. Then she stopped. With no further contact from my birth family, I became eligible for adoption — which is the only thing I can be grateful to my grandmother for. I was adopted by Ida, my foster mom and her husband Charley.
As soon as my adoption was official and I finally had two new parents, my dad Charley left us. He packed up the only car and canceled all the credit cards. After that, my mom Ida never remarried and raised me to adulthood as a single parent. She was an awesome mom.
However, I was often depressed as a teen, always having it in the back of my mind that somewhere out there was a birth mother who didn’t want me. I didn’t find out until years later about the day mom Linda came to my house screaming and hollering for me, saying I had been stolen from her and she wanted her baby back. Mom Ida told her that the adoption was official and a man dragged Linda away. I think it was shortly after that, Linda committed suicide.
Meanwhile, the older I got, the more I became aware of the abortion issue and the continuous demand for the “rights of women to control their own bodies.” By the time I went to college in the 80’s, people were constantly screaming about pro-choice rights, especially on campus. Of course, rape was considered one of the most condoned reason to have an abortion, and the very concept that a woman who had been raped or was the victim of incest should keep her baby was almost universally repugnant. I was a result of both, so what did that make me?
I considered the idea that my mother may have had a happier life if she had been able to abort me, and I was troubled enough to imagine that maybe I would have been better off not having been born. I literally believed that. Because everybody seemed to agree, (including some Christians) that the life of the child didn’t matter in these cases, so I had this deep down (irrational) guilt that it was my fault that I was abandoned. My birth mother probably hated me, I reasoned. People kept saying it wasn’t fair for the victimized woman to be forced to deal with “the rapist’s child,” didn’t they? I even wrote a paper in college entitled, “The Baby,” where I argued strongly in favor of abortion. What a fool I was. I really wish I had known then what I know now.
When I became a Christian nine years ago, it was the first time I began to see my worth and the true gift and value of my life. I realized that if God had given me life, that was reason enough to deserve to be here. I realized that the entire pro-choice movement was an excuse for people to be able to selfishly kill babies out of convenience and not because of the pregnancy occurring due to rape (which happens 1% of the time) or incest (which happens 0.5% of the time). It is despicable that the pro-abortion groups brainwash the willing masses into believing that rape is a valid reason to be able to kill a baby.
The way I was conceived was not my fault; I did not choose my teen mom or my rapist father / grandfather. How would killing me have righted any other wrongs? Also, people who argue that babies conceived by incest should be aborted because there will be some physical deformity or brain damage are wrong too.
Dare I say, based on statistics, most people are careless, have sex casually because they want what they want, and abandon all values and common sense. Then they arrogantly feel they deserve a right to choose — a “get out of jail free card” stamped with the words RAPE and INCEST. The abortion supporters cling desperately to these words as shields to hide behind, so they can continue to use abortion as a form of birth control and feel good about it. Well guess what? If it was an accident, a mistake, a drunken one-night stand, or a rape, we — the children conceived in those circumstances — still want to live!
There are now videos on the internet where ex-abortionists are talking about seeing the fetuses on ultrasound backing away and dodging the forceps as the doctor attempts to grab them. We — the children targeted for abortion — want the “right to choose” to live like anyone else. How dare these so-called “women’s supporters” put the women in a potentially worse psychological position by offering them a chance to become a murderer in addition to having already been a victim of rape or incest. How much better might I have felt about my own life without having to hear year after year, election after election, how most likely my mother would have had a better life if she had chosen to kill me? The idea really seemed true to me at the time because my young mother did have a tragic life. But could her life have been better and is it somewhat possible she may have been less psychologically damaged if her mother had chosen to support her instead of her rapist, or if society had told her it’s normal to love your own child?
A baby is not a punishment, (unlike what former President Obama so glibly stated) and a baby is not a jail sentence. But a baby is clearly proof of rape, and if justice had been followed, my DNA could have landed the rapist father in jail, with my mother finally safe from him.
At this point you may accuse me of being self-righteous and unable to identify with women on the other side, women who may be in the predicament of having an unwanted pregnancy. Believe me when I say I HAVE been on the other side. When I was 21 I had an abortion. I drank the kool-aid and convinced myself to believe the lies of narcissistic convenience, i.e. it’s just a blob of cells, my body / my choice, it’s just a medical procedure and on and on. Not knowing the value of my own life, I had already written the paper supporting abortion. . . . I was already halfway there. I desperately wanted the rhetoric to be true because I wanted a reason not to have to feel guilty and selfish, even though I did feel that way.
But I am now 52 years old and I can honestly say my abortion remains one of the worse decisions I have ever made in my life. Immediately after it was over, I cried deep anguished sobs right there in the clinic, because I knew I was wrong and I regretted it deeply. It was not a blob of cells, it was my baby. I miss the child I could have raised. I’ve prayed to God for His mercy and forgiveness. He still blessed me with my daughter. Being her mother is one of the great joys of my life.
This is not an easy story to tell. It’s taken a lot of years to be able to say a lot of this out loud. But occasionally women come to me and tell me I have changed their way of thinking about abortion or any negative feelings they may have about being conceived from rape or incest, and that makes it all worthwhile! I am very grateful to God for any large or small way I can be a blessing to anyone else and ultimately keep a baby alive. Having a baby, even if you are raped or even in the case of incest, is not the worst thing that could possibly happen to you. After personally experiencing the loss, I feel abortion is the worst thing. Don’t allow the violence or wrong that was inflicted on you lead you to inflicting violence or wrong on the most innocent of all victims.
BIO: Donna Shibuya is a Christian, pro-life, mother of 1, an administrative analyst for a law enforcement agency and now a pro-life blogger for Save The 1. She lives in Los Angeles County with her 20 year-old daughter. Donna has shared her testimony in churches, and hopes to begin speaking for pro-life ministries.
