After Having Two Abortions, Mother of Five Finds Healing Through Jesus and Story of Own Adoption
Disclosure: Some of the links below contain affiliate links at no additional cost to you that may earn Liftable Media a commission on purchases.
A Connecticut woman is sharing her emotional story of adoption, abortion, shame and healing in hopes of calling out abortion for what it truly is and sharing that there can be hope after it.
In 2015, Erika Kapustinski was a mother of four children and was eight weeks pregnant when she walked into a Planned Parenthood and walked out with a pill that would end her unborn baby’s life.
“It was a season of pain, brokenness, depression, fear, anger, and where I allowed the enemy to creep into my life and my heart in ways that entangled me and twisted everything I thought to have known,” she wrote on her blog four years later.
“I would often tell myself that I did not actually end the life of my baby because I only swallowed this pill that some nurse gave me at Planned Parenthood. I kept telling myself that I somehow, did the right thing.”
But the grief, shame and depression only got worse, and six months later, she found out she was pregnant again. This time, however, she was 14 weeks along.
Still wrapped in the pain, brokenness and depression she faced before her first abortion, she decided to get a second abortion — a surgical one.
“After I left the recovery room later that day, I drove home and wept,” she recalled. “I never wanted to have the abortion, but I allowed the voices around me and the enemy to consume my thought process and I went ahead with it anyways.”
Kapustinski spent the next few years trying to cover her deep trauma with “stuff” and it only felt like putting a band-aid on a hemorrhaging wound; nothing was fixing the core problem, even after she gave birth to her fifth child in 2017.
It wasn’t until she attended a post-abortion course, which sought to bring healing to women who have had abortions, that she allowed herself to feel the emotion surrounding her abortions and was able to reflect on her own childhood adoption story. In doing so, she began to feel free.
https://www.instagram.com/p/BzjlWE7JJS5/
Conceived in Rape, Adopted and Loved
Kapustinski was adopted when she was only 4 months old. Even though her adoptive parents were open and honest about her adoption, she wasn’t curious about her birth parents until she was in high school.
While on a youth retreat with her church, the longing to know more about her birth parents grew deep. When she returned home, Kapustinski decided to sit her adoptive parents down and ask for any information they had.
Her adoptive mom stood up, walked into another room and returned with a handful of letters that her birth mother had sent each year around her birthday. Her parents had been waiting for the right moment to share them.
Just a few months later, Kapustinski met her birth mother for the first time. “It was full of emotions with everything and nothing that I expected all at the same time,” she wrote to Love What Matters. “I was grateful I had met her and could be in some kind of contact going forth.”
Their correspondence continued over the next few years, but soon, the two lost contact for four years.
At the end of that period, when Kapustinski was a 21-year-old mother-of-two, the same deep longing that had manifested at youth camp five years earlier began to grow; she wanted to know more about her birth father, too.
She knew that her mother was only 14 years old when she gave birth, but her birth mom had never mentioned anything about Kapustinski’s birth father. So she called her birth mom and directly asked.
“You were conceived in rape,” her birth mom said, beginning to weep. “I don’t know who he is. I can only tell you what I remember of how he looked at that time. I remember hearing someone else call his name, I think, a friend of his maybe, but I barely remember that.”
Shocked at first, Kapustinski was unsure what to say. Sensing the sadness and apologetic tone in her mother’s voice, she eventually said, “Thank you for loving me enough to choose adoption for me. I love you.”
Finding Hope and Freedom After Abortion
As Kapustinski sat in grief and shame over her abortions, she realized just how much strength her birth mother displayed by choosing adoption over abortion, considering both her age and the circumstances surrounding the conception.
“(My abortions) caused such a deep depression in my life and shame took root in so many different forms in my life the months and years following and I never, ever really felt good enough; to myself, to others, to my kids, and especially to God,” she wrote on her blog.
“I walked through both of those abortions by myself and the trauma that I faced during those and following was too much to bear.”
But the 8-week “Forgiven and Set Free” class through her local faith-based pregnancy center, ABC Women’s Center, would provide her the opportunity to actually address the root of her shame and ask God to heal her from it.
ABC Women’s Center provides pregnancy tests, ultrasounds, parenting support, options counseling and post-abortion support. Their “Forgiven and Set Free” class is based on a 12-week bible study written by Linda Cochrane that the center has condensed into an 8-week course.
“We have seen women heal from their abortion wounds and mature in faith,” Mickeve Regis, the Client Service Manager at the ABC Women’s Center, told The Western Journal. “The Bible study covers the stages of grief, forgiveness and acceptance.”
Through the scripture-based course, the lies Kapustinski believed about herself were dispelled and replaced with the truths of God sees her.
“God saw me as chosen, called, loved, enough, forgiven and he brought healing to every broken piece of my heart in ways that transformed my mothering to my 5 earthly children,” she wrote.
https://www.instagram.com/p/BzUNsa6pLEF/
Sharing Her Story To Bring Hope to Others
One year after discovering freedom and hope after her own abortions, Kapustinski felt God call her to share her story more publicly, not only to speak against the lie that abortions are good, but also to show women who have already had abortions that healing is possible.
Through her blog and future speaking engagements, Kapustinski’s biggest prayer is that God will use her words to speak into the lives of women who have been caught in between a political debate.
“Abortion is not talked about enough, not in the way it should be,” she told The Western Journal. “And when it is talked about, it seems that it is always attacks from pro-life and pro-choice instead of it coming from a place of pro-love.”
https://www.instagram.com/p/Bypxai5JOvD/
She also hopes that through her blog other women can see that they don’t have to wallow in the shame that follows abortion.
“I don’t share my story to boast anything of my own, I share my story as a way to bring hope to hopeless, to bring restoration to the broken women who walk in shame, to show who God is and how extravagant his love is for us and how he desires freedom and healing for post-abortive women,” she wrote on Facebook after her Love What Matters story was published.
“We have to humble and position ourselves in a way that is all God, and nothing of ourselves. I step back, allowing God to go before me and trust that He will give me his voice, his power, his love, so that people may read about my story and see more of Him,” she continued.
“There is hope after abortion. There is healing.”
Truth and Accuracy
We are committed to truth and accuracy in all of our journalism. Read our editorial standards.
