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My junior year of college, I got pregnant. I was married, but the top layer of my wedding cake had barely frozen and unwritten thank you cards lay strewn on my living room carpet. I wasn't ready to get married; I certainly wasn't prepared for pregnancy and parenthood. But I was the personification of readiness compared with the man who was then my husband, whose troubled past was wreaking havoc on our relationship, even without a baby to br /eak the camel's back.

I never once seriously considered abortion, but more than once wished I could. As a Christian ministry major, I'd spent the last two years watching midnight turn into dawn discussing ethics and forming my embr /yonic ideas into convictions ready to stand the light of day. From the moment I saw the second pink line faintly glimmering on my pregnancy test, certainty gripped me that abortion was not an option. I simply could not lose my baby without losing myself. And on the deepest level, I think this truth holds for every woman. But not every woman facing a crisis pregnancy has a Christian education, parents who are willing to help out financially, and girlfriends who pick up where an absent partner or a terrified, emotionally crippled one leaves off.

As my pregnancy progressed, I watched my smooth, flat tummy turn into a bulging basketball and then into a giant globe with roads and rivers of stretch marks crisscrossing everywhere. Knowing the pregnancy was unexpected, my friends weren't sure whether to congratulate me or mourn with me. Whenever I swiped my card in the cafeteria or hauled my huge self to class at my evangelical college, I got raised-eyebr /ow glances from students who assumed I got into my interesting condition via some premarital tryst in the bushes. My professors learned to expect my midclass dashes to the bathroom. Sometimes the trips were just bladder appeasement, but usually I threw up so hard I was afraid the tiny child might come up through my mouth.

When I returned to my bioethics class after one such interruption, the topic was abortion. A class member was playing devil's advocate. "What if it's a 12-year-old girl who didn't know what she was doing? Can you make her carry her pregnancy to term when she's literally a child?" From across the room I heard a girl mutter angrily, "Abortion is murder." Several heads nodded righteously, with no compassion in their eyes. I shivered in the blustery wind on my way home from class.

Marital pain continued and I often found my greatest intimacy with the porcelain throne. After hurling I'd collapse from dehydration on the bathroom tiles and cry to God, mouthing a simple "Help" from stomach-acid stained lips. One night, saltine in hand, I prayed, "God, help me keep this cracker down long enough to nourish my baby." Nibbling that saltine was the most real Communion I've ever taken.

My physically and emotionally difficult unplanned pregnancy instilled mercy in me for women in desperate situations who make desperate decisions. Deep in my belly churning with life grew the conviction that I must do something to help other women. My third trimester I volunteered at a local crisis pregnancy center.

The first Monday I waddled into the Capital Area Pregnancy Center, I was greeted with the mild, professional "May I help you?" reserved for clients. I smiled obligingly, announced that I was a volunteer, played with my wedding ring, and threw in a comment about what my husband was doing that very moment, so as to clear up confusion about me being a "case."

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November 2004, Vol. 48, No. 11