I got pregnant. I chose to keep my baby. And my Christian school humiliated me.
Making the decision to become a teenage parent was hard. What came next was even harder.
By Madeline Runkles June 1 at 6:00 AM
Madeline Runkles is a high school student in Maryland.
I’m only 18 years old, and I’m about to have a baby boy in the fall as a result of my deliberate failure to adhere to a pledge of chastity I signed at my school.
Until this year, I was an ordinary high school student at Heritage Academy, a Christian school in Hagerstown, Md. I was the president of the student council and vice president of the Key Club. I played soccer, had a 4.0 GPA, and ate ice cream and watched movies with my best friends on the weekends. My Christian faith is also extremely important to me, so I involved myself at my church working in the nursery, helping out with Vacation Bible School and helping my mom with meals for church bus drivers on Sunday mornings.
But in January, all that changed. What I thought was the flu was actually the very beginning of my pregnancy. This wasn’t the way it was supposed to be. I was going to graduate in a few months with very good grades and then in the fall I was going to head off to Bob Jones University in South Carolina.
I am a born-again Christian, one who made a mistake with a very visible consequence. Even though I grew up knowing abortion was wrong, I also knew that it would make things easier for me — no one would know what I had done, and I could get on with my life. I had seen women being forgiven who admitted to having abortions, while women who kept their babies seemed to be harder to forgive. But the more I thought about abortion, the more I knew I couldn’t go through with it. In my view, abortion is taking a life. And I couldn’t do that.
I told the baby’s father first. I didn’t know how to tell my parents, because even though they were very involved in both my brother’s life and mine, telling my parents I was pregnant at 18 wasn’t at the top of my list of things I thought I would ever do.
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2017/06/01/i-got-pregnant-i-chose-to-keep-my-baby-and-my-christian-school-humiliated-me/
= new reply since forum marked as read
That's a great first post and thank you for saying it.
How hard is it to use quote marks in a subject line to indicate this is not your own essay? Hmmm? 
Welcome to DU.
...while she was being branded with the scarlet letter? Still playing sports? Still walking in the graduation ceremony? Inviting someone else to the prom? Packing his bags for Bob Jones U?
Back in the Bad Old Days of 1960-1965, contraception was scarcely available (or even legal) for teenage girls. Abortion was dangerous, expensive, and against the law. A pregnant girl really had two choices: get married in a real hurry to a reluctant boy, or go into hiding ("visit an aunt in another town"
until giving up her firstborn child to adoption.
But while these options scared me and gods know how many others into being "good," I never, ever, would have imagined a scene at my public high school like what she endured: public confession in front of everyone, public humiliation and scorn in front of everyone.
Those fcking hypocrites.
Pissed-off Grandma, aka Hekate
