(LifeSiteNews) — A young woman who chose life for the baby she conceived through rape has come out swinging against pro-abortion rhetoric that uses tragic situations like her own to justify abortions.
In an interview on Students for Life of America’s new podcast “Let’s Talk About Life” hosted by Christine Yeargin and Autumn Higashi, 20-year-old Ayala Isenberg (then Harrison) gave her testimony about becoming a pro-life advocate about conceiving through rape as a young teenager and choosing not to get an abortion.
“I find it pretty insulting, honestly, to use women like me and our children as political fodder for [the pro-abortion] narrative, and mostly for economic gain for the abortion industry,” Isenberg said. “I find it insulting because I think it’s speaking over women like me and our children.”
The abortion lobby will do everything they can to silence the voices of women whose babies were conceived in sexual assault. Share this video to amplify @prolifejewess‘s story!
Listen to her full story at https://t.co/D31SsQaCNt. pic.twitter.com/f5S5vWqQP3
— Students for Life of America (@StudentsforLife) January 10, 2024
The committed young mother from Charlotte, North Carolina, whom the podcast hosts described as “fierce” and a “firecracker,” shared her devastating story of having been “raped more times than I can count” during four years of abuse beginning when she was just a little girl.
When she conceived her daughter, Rachel, as a result of sexual assault at just 15 years old, she rejected abortion after seeing “a flier for a crisis pregnancy center” that “helped me realize there were people who wanted to help me, like, really desperately.”
That’s when she began to identify as a pro-life advocate, something she says has “been the most important thing in my life” and spurred a desire to enter politics to fight for the unborn.
RELATED: Mother credits Massachusetts pro-life center with saving her children from abortion
In her interview with Students for Life, she said her pregnancy had forced her to “reckon with the reality [of the] humanity of the preborn, which is something we don’t as a society often have to think about.”
She said she has frequently been “shouted down” by pro-abortion individuals “who have not experienced pregnancy or rape or sexual assault” but who nonetheless object to her pro-life perspective even though it stems from her own experiences.
Isenberg shared an experience in which she responded to a young woman’s support for abortion in cases of rape by explaining that she herself became pregnant in that way and nonetheless felt her baby “was deserving of life.”
According to Isenberg, the pro-abortion woman “completely changed her demeanor, and she said, ‘you’re disgusting.’ For Isenberg, the experience was “heartbreaking.”
“I think that that’s the way a lot of these people feel about women like me,” she said.
Despite the negative reactions, however, Isenberg has stood firm in her conviction that the unborn deserve life despite the circumstances of their conception and received positive feedback from fellow rape survivors who have felt silenced.
She said women suffer because they don’t often hear about the other options that are available because those options cut against the pro-abortion narrative.
“Rarely do you hear the stories of, you know, a devastating reality of sexual abuse. And then the child that they decided to keep and love and, you know, either place for adoption or to raise themselves,” she said.
Based on her personal experiences and the stories shared with her by fellow rape survivors, Isenberg extended a challenge to those who would advertise abortion as a solution to rape.
“I would honestly just ask them, what do you think abortion does for rape victims?” she said. “What do you think it does for them? Because a lot of people haven’t really, I guess, thought this out that much, but they kind of subconsciously assume that once you take away the ‘rape baby,’ which is a term that I don’t appreciate from the situation, that suddenly that makes the situation better.”
She said that women still have trauma from the assault that will persist after the abortion and require healing through therapy.
“Abortion has nothing to do with healing from the rape, at all,” she said. “I can’t see any way in which it is healing, or progress in any way for that woman, that survivor like me, to go to an abortion clinic, to be strapped on a table, to have her child violently taken from her, which is often very traumatic, and then to be dumped on the side of the road” and told by the abortion facility to simply “call us if something happens.”
“That’s not healing,” she said. “None of that sounds like what a survivor would want to feel after being sexually assaulted. In fact, to me, abortion does sound very similar to what it feels like to be sexually assaulted.”
Enduring the horrific abuse that she did, Isenberg said that she is able to deeply empathize with other women and girls who become pregnant via rape. And she knows that abortion is not the only way out.
“It is painful. It is scary. You just want to get out of it,” she said. “And I know what it feels like to be willing to do something you wouldn’t normally be comfortable doing, because you just need to escape. You need to stop being hurt like this.”
“But I would also say that the ramifications of losing that baby are going to last a lifetime,” Isenberg said. She encouraged women to report their abusers to the authorities and “escape what happened without ending the life of your baby, because those consequences are forever.”
She advised people within the pro-life movement to become educated about abuse in order to best help and communicate with women who have become pregnant due to rape so as to avoid “retraumatizing” survivors, noting that it’s extremely important for those in a position to help to “see” and “understand” the mother’s situation.
“I think it also can prevent the misconception that it’s like, ‘Oh, I’m going to see through you and just care about your baby,’” she said, touching on an accusation frequently used by pro-abortion activists against pro-life groups, even though pro-life organizations go to extraordinary lengths to care for and support moms as well as their babies.
RELATED: Pro-life pregnancy centers provided nearly $360 million worth of goods and services in 2022: report
Addressing the young mothers themselves in her remarks during the podcast, Isenberg urged them to recognize that “if you just reach out and ask for help, there are so many people, especially within the pro-life community” who “want to help you in this situation and you have to reach out and ask for it.”
“You always have a choice. Abortion is not your only option,” she said. “Do not let anybody tell you that. Not your boyfriend, not your mom, not your abuser, not anybody in this situation, because, ultimately, it’s your choice. You can keep that baby.”