This is Toni's story:
My mother, Rosalia, found herself single and pregnant at the age of 34. Post World War II Germany was a hostile place for a single, pregnant woman. Rosalia gave birth to me and later married a man who adopted me to give me his last name. Rosalia died before I was three years old and there is no information on why or when I became a ward of Catholic Charities and was placed in an orphanage.
At five and a half years of age, I was adopted by American parents, sight unseen. I arrived in the U.S. speaking not a word of English. My name was changed by my adopted parents, who had a son who was six years old.
Although I was not brought up in a Christian home, I did have a very religious background, having gone to a parochial school for 13 years. I had a strong belief in God. I knew He answered prayer, but I didn't have a personal relationship with Jesus. I wanted more than anything to be good and pleasing. I wanted God to approve of me. In my early 20s, I really started having serious doubts about religion, for nothing seemed consistent and true.
In 1971 I married Jack, a man I thought I had met purely by chance. I know now that God had chosen him for me and me for him. In 1973 we lost our first baby boy when I was six months pregnant. He lived only 12 hours. The grief was overwhelming then. Now I am comforted in knowing we will meet Ian again in Heaven.
After two beautiful, miracle children and 14 years of marriage, Jack and I separated. The five previous years of our marriage had been spent in serious trouble. We had drifted further and further apart. I decided that nothing could repair all the damage we had done to each other, so I moved with the children to start a new life.
During our separation, Jack came to the end of himself. By God's divine plan, he heard the gospel on Christian TV and gave his heart to the Lord. He started reading the Bible and claiming God's promises. The circumstances really looked dismal for any reconciliation between us, but Jack trusted God to bring us back together. And God did bring me back with the children one year later. It took time for me to trust this remarkable conversion as well as regain trust in our marriage relationship. But when I saw what God had done in Jack's life and how he had changed, I wanted to have the same experience. I committed my heart to Jesus in 1987. The Lord became my heavenly Father and I was "adopted" for the third time. I was now a child of God. After working for most of marriage, we decided that it would honor God if I "retired" from my career in the government and devoted myself to building our family. We all grew spiritually and we were able to pay off our huge debts.
During the summer of 1990, I started praying for God's direction in my life. Since I was the child of a crisis pregnancy, I wondered what I could do in the pro-life movement. I was moved by what I heard about CPC ministries at church. When I saw an announcement of a CPC volunteer training, I planned to attend.
I praise God for bringing me to Himself and for allowing me to be part of the ministry at Assist CPC. Counselling has been one of the most difficult things I've ever done, but the reward is knowing that in some small way, God has used me in the lives of the women to bring about life and not death, and to give them the opportunity to be adopted into the family of God.
--Toni
November is National Adoption Month. Take time to research adoption with your pregnant daughter, along with single parenting and marriage. Then, no matter which of these roads she chooses, she can feel confident that the decision was made with care and thought instead of off-handedly. When things are tough in the future (because life can be hard no matter what we choose), she can remind herself that she actively chose her road instead of saying "I wish I had considered ______."
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