Watch Pat, Terry, and Gordon on your iPod as they bring you amazing stories and celebrity interviews.
Have you experienced the presence of God?
Ron DiCianni: Painting the Resurrection?
Become a CBN partner and receive The Transforming Word: Verses to Overcome Fear and Experience Peace, our special DVD/CD gift to you.
CBN Partners are making a difference sharing the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Find out how.
CBN.com – "As they're getting me ready, I'm lying on that bed thinking, I hope these nurses don't know what I'm here for. I wish somebody would just break through the doors and say, 'Stop! Don't do this,' " Kimberlee Stone recalls.
But no one did. So Kimberlee kept her abortion a shameful secret for years. She'd been raised in a loving, Christian home where she knew right from wrong. But peer pressure is a powerful thing.
"It all starts out slowly and what we thought was innocently," she says. "That was truly a downfall being with friends who were not Christians and starting to drink. You're not in control of yourself when you're drinking like that. I started a life of lying to my parents. They had no idea."
Running around with the popular crowd and getting involved in drinking led to promiscuity.
"You have one drink," says Kimberlee, "and it's hard to stand up for anything. You are easily swayed by a person. Everybody's doing it, so why not? It was fun. We thought it was fun."
And with sexual promiscuity often comes pregnancy. Such was the case with Kimberlee.
"I thought maybe I could go somewhere, but I was too fearful. I was too fearful to tell anybody," Kimberlee admits. "I know that if I had told my parents, they would have responded in love. They would not have let me go through that."
Yet Kimberly chose not to turn to her parents.
She says, "It seemed easier to have an abortion than to go through with telling them, first and foremost. I had plans to go away to college the next semester."
When Kimberlee's boyfriend heard the news, he responded coldly.
"The first thing he said was, 'We can take care of this,' " Kimberlee remembers. "I wanted a man who knew God, who shared my faith, or what I thought was my faith. I wanted a Christian. I knew that. So part of me, I think, just wanted to hear that this person would take care of me. I knew at that moment out relationship was over."
Kimberlee vividly recalls the day she got an abortion.
"I remember the moment they put the anesthesia to my face and then waking up. I remember the doctor coming back in, and I remember him patting me on the knee saying, 'Everything's going to be OK,' as though he just took my tonsils out. That was it. That's all he had for me, and going on my way thinking, I can never go back and undo what I have just done, and knowing because of how I was raised, 'God, what have I done? What have I done?' "
Of course, there were consequences.
"If somebody would mention abortion, I can just kind of remember the blood draining because I thought, They are going to know by the look on my face," she says. "I walked around every day thinking, God's going to get me. He's going to punish me. I lived that way for a long time."
Eventually, Kimberlee married that wonderful Christian man that she was dreaming of.
"I
never told my husband that I had this abortion," she explains. "That
was my secret. I thought, He doesn't need to know. He was following
the Lord. He lived the kind of life I should have lived and I thought, He
can't handle this."
Kimberlee and Regi very much wanted to have children, but it just wasn't happening.
"I thought this was my punishment. If it wasn't God, it was something I did to myself. I did this to myself. My body doesn't work right. It serves you right. That was kind of my mentality," she says.
Eventually, Kimberlee decided to tell her husband the truth that the good Christian girl Regi thought he had married had a dark secret.
"I told him on an airplane," she says, "because I figured I had him captive. He couldn't go anywhere, so I finally told him. He was just shocked."
Regi couldn't help thinking there might have been a connection between the abortion and their current state of infertility.
"I didn't know how to deal with it, how my wife could do that," Regi explains. "There was the anger of I would never get to have a child because of the poor choice that I felt she had made. At the same time, I loved her deeply and I didn't want to hurt her."
The solace Kimberlee needed initially eluded her.
"I was at a point where I needed him to talk to me. I was finally telling somebody, and he shut down," she recalls.
Kim found out about a post-abortion Bible study at a local Crisis Pregnancy Center. It was hard, but she went.
"That is the time that I learned this is not about God's punishment. This is not about the shame and the guilt. This was about God and me, not about a child, wanting a child, not about needing my husband to communicate with me more. I came out of that Bible study a completely different person," she says.
Regi needed a bit more time, but God was healing his heart, too.
"There came a time that I just saw what God had done in her heart and the change that had happened and the freedom that she began to feel, and it was just over a period of time I just said, 'I want to support you in this. I want you to share what God has done,' " Regi says.
Kim now tells women what the abortion clinic won't. She even wrote a book.
She tells other women who are dealing with the same hurt and shame, "Don't stop praying. God gets us to a place in our lives where we are so hungry and thirsty for Him, not for somebody to come in and make it better, not for a husband, not for a child. God wants us to be 100 percent reliable and needing of Him. Open your Bible and search it. Don't expect somebody else to pull you through or to pray you out of it. Start praying yourself and start crying out to God because God is there. He doesn't just leave us."
Kimberlee
and Regi have since been able to adopt two lovely children, which has brought
the Stones healing.
"I guess I go from 'I'm never going to have a child' and here I am years later now with two incredible gifts from God," says Regi.
"We look at our kids and we think, This is what it's all about. This is God's mercy and grace. Look how He turned something so horrible and He made it so good. I couldn't be happier," Kimberlee says smiling.
Considering an abortion? There is help on CBN.com's Spiritual Life Channel.
A caring friend will be there to pray with you in your time of need.
