By Elijah Penn, Copyeditor
The life of Dorina Hayes was anything but easy, but she uses her past trauma to help women who are going through similar hardships and champion for the voiceless.
“I really truly feel like we all have a story, something we can share, but it will be hidden if we don’t tell anybody,” said Hayes.
On Feb. 19, Imago Dei hosted Hayes to tell her testimony and answer questions from the audience about her life and abortion. Imago Dei’s president, Aimee McElreath, personally knew Hayes and thought her moving story was worth sharing.
Hayes was born while her father, her mother’s boyfriend at the time, was not present. Her mother soon moved to Texas, where she married her stepfather, Jim.
When she was 14, Hayes’ mother and Jim divorced. Hayes moved in with Jim for a while before being sent back to live with her mother, who was seldom home. Hayes occupied her time with long walks.
On one walk, she encountered a neighborhood boy, and the two struck up a friendship, until she felt uncomfortable around him. However, one day, when she was home alone, the boy came overand asked to come inside. She made several excuses for why she couldn’t let him in.
He forced his way inside and raped 15-year-old Hayes. She remembers being in shock anddeciding not to tell anyone what had happened to her until she later discovered that she was pregnant.
Her parents told her to have an abortion because she was too young to have a baby. She felt as though no one cared about her as a person, only the situation she was in.
Hayes went to her appointment for the abortion, where she was told it “was just a simple procedure” by the doctor. However, she was too far along in her pregnancy, and he referred her to the hospital for an abortion.
“Confused by all this, I trusted my mom and the doctors, and just went wherever they wanted me to go … I can tell you honestly, I came out a whole different person,” said Hayes.
While Hayes still carried the trauma, the people in her life were happy not to have to deal with it anymore.
“It seemed like my mom was relieved, and that all of a sudden everything would be okay, like the problem was fixed, but I wasn’t fixed,” said Hayes.
After three years of seeking comfort in abusive relationships and two more abortions, Hayes met a Catholic man, John, who was different from her past boyfriends. She soon became pregnant with him.
John asked her to keep the baby, but when she told her mother, she threatened to kick Hayes out of the house if she didn’t abort it. The man’s parents offered her a place to stay and congratulated her on the baby.
At 12 weeks, the doctor showed Hayes an ultrasound of her baby.
“The baby was perfect. You could see the hands, the legs, the arms, the head, and even fingers. Then he said, ‘listen, you can hear the baby’s heartbeat,’” remembered Hayes, “It hit me that I aborted two 12-week-old babies … No one ever showed me an ultrasound before, and no one ever told me that babies actually had a heartbeat.”
Hayes is now happily married to John, and they have seven children today.
Later, she began joining her mother-in-law to pray outside of abortion clinics. She recalled one day when a man yelled at them, “What if the woman was raped?” Hayes felt compelled to share her story from the heart:
“I was raped at 15, and I had an abortion, and it didn’t fix anything. I remember every single detail about what happened that day. The only thing it fixed was that no one had to think about that day or speak about it to me again. But what about me—the victim? No one helped me with the rape, the abortion, none of it. They just forgot about it.”
“I still remember it, not just the rape, but the innocent baby that had to die because of the way they were conceived,” Hayes added, “I went on to have two more abortions, and they were all the same. They all left me feeling hollow, and I was depressed. Abortion is abortion. It leaves a woman wounded, an innocent life in the womb, dead.”
“I regret my abortions, and until abortion becomes unthinkable, I will be silent no more,” Hayes concluded.
1 Comment
Wow! This is a impactful story. Great article.