A 9-Year-Old Got Pregnant in My Evangelical Megachurch
Church Leaders Praised Her Forced Pregnancy
This article was originally published to Medium on 05 May 2022, just after the leaked Supreme Court draft decision but before the formal Dobbs ruling was actually handed down on 24 June 2022.
It was the autumn of 1998. I was 15 years old and had just started tenth grade. My first year of high school. In those days, ninth graders were put in the junior high at both public schools and my church’s youth group. Even though I had technically been a high school student for a full year already, I was new to the public high school building, the high school youth group, and the entire culture of being a high school student. For several reasons, ninth grade had been the most difficult year of my adolescence, and I was looking forward to starting over. A clean slate.
My family had started attending a non-denominational megachurch when we moved to the suburbs. I attended children’s church every Sunday morning and went to camp or VBS (Vacation Bible School) every summer, but I was not involved beyond that during elementary school. That changed in junior high. I switched school districts and had no friends at that most difficult transition from childhood to adolescence. Church became my safe space. It was much easier to make friends at youth group than it was in public school. I became very involved: Sunday mornings, Wednesday nights, student leadership teams, mission trips, choir tours, worship teams, summer camps, weekend retreats, and so on. If there was something going on in junior high youth group, I was almost certainly there.
This level of involvement continued into high school with Sunday mornings and Wednesday nights. I also joined a high school leadership team as one of only a handful of sophomores, as well as the high school choir. Around October, we were given the choice between choir tour or a mission trip for the following summer. They were both set for the same few weeks in June and July, so doing both was not an option. I would have to decide. The choir tour would be to Southern California, and I was very excited about that. But the mission trip would be to Rome. Rome, Italy. And I was very excited about that too. I had never even been to Canada before, and I had always had this idea that I would like travelling. I was at an impasse. I really didn’t know which to choose. I had always been very musically inclined, taking part in school choirs and musicals for years. But … Italy. Tough decision.
Even though I had grown up in a fairly conservative family and several conservative churches within various evangelical and pentecostal denominations, I was never very militantly pro-life. I probably would have said I was pro-life in junior high, but I was not very invested in the stance or its arguments. It had always seemed very rooted in knee-jerk emotions and the manipulative use of words like “baby” and “murder” to humanize something that was not yet human. I also knew back then both that I was adopted and that my birth mother had been a young teenager. That still hadn’t swayed me into the unequivocally pro-life camp.
Back to the megachurch. I decided to keep my options open. I turned in my application to go to Rome while continuing to attend choir practice. During one particular Sunday afternoon in the church’s choir room, we were given choral arrangements for True Love Waits songs. True Love Waits was a sort of parachurch organization that promoted purity culture. They were very big back in the mid-1990s to mid-2000s. This is the only time I remember being directly exposed to purity culture propaganda at church. We never did any of the other things that are very common in more conservative evangelical and fundamentalist churches: purity balls, purity pledges, purity rings, and so on. Staying pure for marriage was often mentioned or discussed in more detail by pastors at youth group and speakers at summer camps or retreats, but nothing concrete was ever presented to us. This was the only exception.
As our choir director began discussing plans for that summer’s choir tour, he decided to drop a bombshell. Something that must have been kept hush-hush by the higher-ups in church leadership because no one else in the room had heard this. He informed us that a nine-year-old girl in the church had gotten pregnant. And that her parents were going to have her bring the baby to term. She would give birth. Or have a C-section. One of the two. But she was not going to be allowed to terminate the pregnancy. It was a precious life, he said, and she was going to see the pregnancy through. Or rather, she was going to be forced to. He gushed about what a testament to the pro-life ethos this was. How the rest of the church’s pastors and staff were praising God over her parents choosing life in the midst of “an unexpected pregnancy.” I also remember his final remark, “I didn’t even know girls that young could get pregnant.”
That doesn’t seem like such a shocking remark to me now. A large percentage of militant pro-lifers, if not most of them, do not know very basic things about the female reproductive system or puberty for teenage and pre-teen girls. Like Rep. Todd Akin of Missouri claiming that “legitimate rape” doesn’t lead to pregnancy because the female body somehow shuts out the sperm from getting a victim of rape pregnant. (It doesn’t.) Or state Rep. Terry England of Georgia who claimed that since his pigs and cows can continue carrying a dead foetus without much risk, human women should also be forced to carry unviable pregnancies to term and give birth to stillborns. He didn’t see what the risk would be, either physically or mentally.
Even at 15 years old, sitting in the choir room of this megachurch I had attended for almost ten years, I knew how wrong this was. I knew that a pregnant nine-year-old was the victim of rape or incest, and most likely both. I knew that a nine-year-old does not have the physical frame to support a developing fetus, and she does not have the physical strength to give birth. An elementary school-aged student has no business being pregnant, and any parent who forces their child to do so is engaging in child abuse. Forced pregnancy is a human rights violation, especially for a child who is not developmentally able to endure its gruelling nine months and then labor itself.
I don’t know who this girl was, and she was never discussed again by anyone in the high school youth group. I don’t know if CPS intervened and took her out of the home. I don’t know if she eventually got an abortion because her child’s body simply couldn’t handle a pregnancy. I don’t know if she actually made it to term and gave birth or had a C-section. I don’t know what medical problems the baby might have had from being born to a pre-teen and/or from being the likely product of incest. I don’t know what kind of scars — physical, mental, or emotional — she was almost certainly left with. I don’t know if the church leadership covered up the situation as they had other instances of sexual assault/abuse in both the adult congregation and the youth groups I had attended. But whatever happened to her, she would have attended the same children’s church services for elementary students that I had for six years. When I was nine, I was playing with Barbies and coloring books and watching Saturday morning cartoons. She should have been too. She should not have been pregnant.
I didn’t go on that choir tour. I never took part in choir at church again. This pride in a forced childhood pregnancy was one of several reasons I chose to go on the mission trip to Italy instead. However, that trip was fraught with its own oppression, manipulation, and gaslighting which sowed the seeds of my first deconstruction a few years later. But that’s another story for another time. I didn’t take part in True Love Waits or sign a purity pledge or get a purity ring. I think deep down, I didn’t want to be controlled by an ideology that would force a child to destroy herself.
The church I attended wasn’t even very extreme within conservative Christianity, evangelicalism, and fundamentalism. We never organized to attend the March for Life. We never took part in pro-life activism. It was talked about in church occasionally, but that was about the extent of it. It was an unspoken rule (or sometimes spoken) that everyone was to vote Republican in order to get Supreme Court justices on the Court who would overturn the 1973 landmark Roe ruling. I think most of the congregation back then never thought that it would actually happen. However, this is what the broader movement wants and has been aiming for since the 1970s. What it has always wanted. Controlling women’s choices. Damaging women who dare to get pregnant at the wrong time or with the wrong person. Punishing women for not being able to take a pregnancy to term. Or simply not wanting to for whatever reason. Overturning Roe will lead to states banning abortion outright with no provisions for rape, incest, D&C for miscarriages, health of the mother, incompatibility with life, and even ectopic pregnancies. Many evangelicals and other conservative Christians probably assume that there will be provisions and exceptions, but there is absolutely no guarantee of that. And the militantly anti-choice want no exceptions whatsoever. Republican lawmakers in some states have discussed banning abortion care for ectopic pregnancies. Which aren’t even pregnancies. They are not viable since they are not attached inside the uterus. But that doesn’t matter to the Religious Right. Science doesn’t matter. Medical emergencies don’t matter. Human rights don’t matter.
I realized that day that an ideology that would destroy the life and body of a nine-year-old girl, a flesh-and-blood human that is already here, for an unformed fetus, is evil. One child sacrificed for the potential of another. I hope she has healed from the trauma forced on her by the adults who were supposed to protect her. And I hope we don’t force any other little girls and women to suffer like I’m sure she did. But it sure looks like we’re going to.
