(Oregon Right to Life) — From a pregnant college student who bravely rejected abortion to a mom of four with an incredible family story of loss and reunion, one Oregon woman’s testimony sheds light on the miracles that come from choosing life.
Born in 1955 in a loving and supportive Catholic family, Elisa* was the seventh of eight children – four boys and four girls.
Her parents had their hands full. “They also had, especially my mom, this undying faith in the goodness of people,” Elisa told Oregon Right to Life in a phone interview.
Cycles of Trauma
Tragically, there was also trauma that Elisa’s parents never knew about.
Starting when she was just seven years old, Elisa said, she was sexually abused by an older brother. This abuse would go on for five years. Feeling that she had no resources available to her, she “compartmentalized” the victimization – but the sense of shame and misplaced “self-blame” was “enormous.”
Later, she said, her trauma deepened when she was date-raped by a boy who drove her home from a high school youth retreat. Again, she felt she couldn’t tell anybody what had happened.
Already “a broken individual,” Elisa dropped out of high school at the end of 11th grade. But she had a keen intellect, and successfully tested into college at just 16. She experimented with diverse majors and interests, ultimately joining Air Force ROTC and declaring a major in theater.
At college, she met an attractive fellow theater major. He had been married young and was going through a divorce that had alienated most of his friends. Elisa felt sympathy for him, and they started spending time together.
“Next thing you know, we’re sleeping together,” she said. Young, affected by past traumas, and lacking any real education about how exactly babies come into the world, she was “dumbfounded” when she became pregnant.
And once again, she was on her own.
Abortion is Legal… But Unacceptable
The year before, the U.S. Supreme Court had issued its ruling in Roe v. Wade. Elisa said her boyfriend told her the pregnancy was her problem, hinting that abortion was now legal.
But if Elisa knew one thing, it was that abortion was utterly unacceptable.
“There was never any question in my mind that abortion meant killing,” she told Oregon Right to Life. “The fact that it became legal, I really didn’t care. To me, that’s killing a child… legal does not mean right.”
For Elisa, there were only two choices. As a young single mother, she felt she couldn’t keep the baby. Adoption was the next best choice, and she knew first-hand it could be a beautiful one. Several of her best friends growing up had been adopted, she explained, and “they were as loved as any kids I have ever known.”
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Guided by her mother, Elisa located a Catholic Charities maternity home, where she stayed for the last three months of her pregnancy. Then, in 1974, she gave birth to a baby boy. She gave him her father’s first name, and for a middle name she chose Isaac – a Biblical reference with deep significance.
“If [Abraham] had to sacrifice his son because God asked him to, I was willing to do the same,” she shared, becoming tearful as she relived the memory. “It seemed like the right name.”
For the next five days in the hospital, Elisa said she “spent every waking moment in the nursery with him, and I talked to him… I walked down the halls with him.”
Saying Goodbye
After less than a week, she had to say goodbye. The adoption of her son was a “closed” one – meaning “I could never go looking for him, but he could look for me.”
She went back to school to finish the quarter. That summer, she reunited with the father of her baby. They got married, but “we had already put the child up for adoption.”
Time went on. Elisa and her husband had three more sons, and Elisa became a captain in the Air Force. But after nineteen years, the marriage abruptly ended in divorce. Now a single mother in the armed forces, she had to rewrite her will to ensure her minor children were cared for.
What she didn’t know was that the routine legal document would be the catalyst for her reunion with her firstborn son.
The Search
After writing the will, and while traveling on a military assignment across the country, Elisa received a call from the oldest of the three boys she had since her marriage. Kyle*, then a recent high school graduate, asked his mother a question that stopped her in her tracks.
“So – I have a brother?”
“You read the will?” Elisa said, realizing how he must have come across the information.
“I’d never seen one before,” the teenager said. “I was curious.”
“Yes, you have an older brother,” Elisa admitted.
The full conversation would have to be tabled for another time. But Kyle couldn’t stop thinking about it. At college with his two known brothers, Kyle kept ruminating about the older brother he’d never met.
He had to ask her.
“Mom, I won’t do it unless you say it’s okay,” Elisa said Kyle told her one day. “But do you care if I try to find my older brother?”
Elisa hesitated, telling him that – because it was a closed adoption – she was prevented by the law from seeking out her eldest son.
But Kyle pointed out that the law didn’t apply to him, since he “wasn’t even born” when the adoption took place.
“I said, ‘That’s a true statement.”
Kyle had the green light to look for his brother.
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He put his research skills – bolstered by academic training in anthropology, an interest and major shared by all of his brothers – to use. Still, it wasn’t easy. It took two years before he tracked down a clue that led him to a phone number that he believed belonged to his brother.
“Kyle started out the conversation with: ‘I’m looking for my older brother who was adopted out at birth, and I think you might be him,’” Elisa recounted. On the other line, Michael* (he had been given a new name by his adoptive family) acknowledged that he had been adopted, but said he never knew he had any younger siblings.
“Oh, you do,” Kyle told him.
“So they just… talked and talked,” Elisa said. An hour in, Michael joked that he was “still looking for the scam angle.” But he was so impressed by his conversation with his younger brother that he said, “Look, man, [even] if we’re not related, I want us to stay friends anyhow.”
Reconnection
Kyle couldn’t wait to share the news with his mom.
“It must’ve been midnight,” Elisa said. Kyle called his mom and recounted his incredible conversation, including the unexpected information about Michael’s profession: “He’s not only an anthropologist… he’s an archeologist. He took it up to PhD level. And that’s what he teaches.”
The brothers had forged a connection. But Michael hesitated slightly about connecting with his mom after all that time. He agreed to let Kyle give Elisa his email address, and after a few messages his hesitation evaporated.
They exchanged photographs, with Michael sending Elisa a picture of himself and Elisa sharing a recent photo of the other three boys.
“He immediately wrote me back. He said… They are absolutely my brothers. There is no question about that. And he said, here’s my information…here’s my background…. you have three grandchildren. Here’s their names and their ages.”
Thoroughly convinced, now, that they had found one another, Elisa could get more personal.
“I wrote him a letter, and I said… I just want you to know how much I wanted you, how important you were to me, why I gave you up for adoption, and that I wanted you to come up in a healthy and loving home and have the opportunities that I couldn’t give you,” she said. “You would have starved with me. You would have been loved, but you would have been hungry… I had nothing. I was a high school dropout, and I hadn’t finished college. I had nothing to give you.”
Michael wrote back, thanking her for making that courageous choice. He assured her that his adoptive parents were “very loving” and “took such good care of me.”
“My mom always called me her miracle child,” he said.
Reunion
On Memorial Day, 2008, the family would finally be reunited. Kyle captured a photo of his mom and her firstborn son “embracing for the first time in 35 years.”
“All I could do was cry and hold on to him,” she said. “I was so joyful and so relieved.”
“I said, ‘I’m sorry, I just can’t let go of you.’ And he said, ‘You don’t have to.’”
Today, at age 70, Elisa is the proud grandma of seven grandchildren, including Michael’s three. Michael, now 51, was the best man at his youngest brother’s wedding. When the brothers spend time together, Elisa said, it’s “as though they had done this all their lives.”
Miracle
The decision to choose adoption for her son has had ripple effects throughout Elisa’s life. Twice during her career in the Air Force, she said young women approached her for advice, having become pregnant and considering abortion. Overwhelmed and scared, they told Elisa they felt like their lives were over. But Elisa encouraged them to reject abortion, using her own experience as an example.
“I’m a captain in the Air Force, does my life look over to you?” she told them. She helped them put the situation into perspective: “It’s a six month inconvenience for you. It is a lifetime for somebody else and all the lifetimes that they then contribute to.” In both instances, she later received thankful letters from moms who had chosen life.
The life-saving power of her story isn’t something Elisa takes for granted.
Describing her story and her reconnection with her long-lost son, she landed on the same word that Michael’s adoptive mother had used to describe him: Miracle.
“I could not be more blessed,” Elisa told Oregon Right to Life. “It’s been a miracle, start to finish.”
*names changed for privacy.
