Healing, then friendship restored after fateful trip to abortion clinic 30 years ago

Jill King remembers her roommate 30 years ago calling her into the bathroom of their apartment. Carla Stream was sitting on a chair, wrapped in a towel.

“She looked up at me and said, ‘I’m pregnant.’”

Stream thought she would have to move out. King wanted to help.

“It was my first experience living away from home,” King, 52, told The Catholic Spirit. “I thought, ‘I’m a big adult girl, I can take care of my friend.’”

King said she was raised in a faith-filled, Christian home, but unexpected pregnancy and abortion were not topics of discussion. Absorbing the news, trying to find a solution, the women turned to the phone book. King recalls many entries under “pregnancy” offering abortion services and clinics — but not much else.

“‘I can help you,’” she told her friend of the abortion option. “‘I can take off of work.’ I told her I’d taken other people before, maybe to help her feel better about it. It was a lie.”

King had never taken anyone to have an abortion. Nonetheless, she did take a day off that September in 1990, so she could drive Stream from their apartment in White Bear Lake to an abortion clinic in Minneapolis. She remembers what it felt like in the reception area, seeing a visibly pregnant girl, crying with her mother, and thinking, “We’re the smart ones; we’re (obtaining an abortion) before (the baby) shows.”

In that moment, 17 years after the U.S. Supreme Court’s Jan. 22, 1973, Roe v. Wade decision legalized abortion across the country, King was led with Stream into a room where they watched a video showing a cartoonish figure of a cluster of what looked like red grapes. This is your baby, people at the abortion clinic told those gathered.

“They show you that to demonstrate it’s OK; it’s not human yet,” King said. Another lie.

Stream, 55, said she felt lonely, desperate, fearful and anxious about being pregnant. She had not grown up in a loving home. As a young adult, she filled that void with partying and dating. Her mother had once paid for her sister to have an abortion. She had friends in college who had had abortions. And in Stream’s mind, the baby’s father was out of the picture, a casual acquaintance from time she spent as a nanny out East, before returning to Minnesota and finding an apartment with King.

“I felt I needed to make a decision,” Stream said. “Jill said she would drive.”

Fatal decision

That fatal decision ended the life of Stream’s child and split their friendship, and it has affected other relationships over the course of their lives, Stream and King said. The abortion began a trail of pain that only through God’s grace and forgiveness led both to strong marriages, children who know their stories and long-standing, pro-life advocacy roles neither would have imagined. King is executive director of a pregnancy resource center, Lakes Life Care Center in Forest Lake. Stream is a former teacher of middle-school children with learning disabilities who works data entry at home, takes speaking engagements to tell her story and helps the pregnancy resource center near her home in Hudson, Wisconsin. She served five years on the board of directors of King’s pregnancy center and organizes a group of volunteers who once a month pray in front of Planned Parenthood in St. Paul.

Neither are Catholic, but both respect and rely on the strong pro-life advocacy work and support of the Catholic Church. They bring the same determination to their Christian communities, in hopes of shaping lives and changing minds about abortion.

A Catholic led The Catholic Spirit to their experiences. Mary Stolz, 59, a nurse and member of St. Peter in Forest Lake who has volunteered at Lakes Life Care Center and served on its board for more than 30 years, said she wants people to know the harm abortion does to people’s lives. She sees it all too often.

“What I’ve discovered is there is so much brokenness, and so much hurt,” Stolz said. “By the time they come here, this is just one of many things in their lives that are so difficult.”

She recalled talking for 90 minutes in the center with one young woman whose baby was nine weeks along. The center’s director of client services followed up with a couple of telephone calls; the first time the woman hurried to get off the phone, saying, “I can’t talk right now,” and the second time she hung up without speaking, Stolz said. People at the center don’t know what happened to the woman or her child, she said.

“I’ve never met someone who really wants an abortion,” Stolz said. “They just feel painted in a corner.”

Back to the future

Stream vividly remembers the video at the abortion clinic that day 30 years ago; and she recalls other women there, some with boyfriends, some with their mothers. “We watched the same video; it’s all just a lump of cells,” Stream said. “We were never given the opportunity for an ultrasound” (a two-dimensional, not three-dimensional, image at that time). Now she knows that viewing an ultrasound of their child can make a difference for women dealing with the thought of having an abortion.

“I had what was considered counseling,” Stream said. Physical and emotional risks of the procedure were not disclosed. A woman asked her if there was a husband involved, a boyfriend or any additional income earner. “She asked me, ‘What kind of mother would you make?’ She closed the sale by saying, ‘Will that be Visa or MasterCard today?’ That’s what they do. They sell abortion.”

“The abortion was the most horrifying experience of my life,” Stream said. “And the pain … I’ve had four kids without drugs, and I’ve never felt anything like that. I was brought to the recovery room and given a warm blanket and peanut butter and jelly toast. I felt relief but only because it was done. I looked at all the other girls, all crying. One was holding her stomach, rocking back and forth, saying, ‘My baby, my baby.’”

Things were not the same between Stream and King. They parted ways.

“I really struggled with everything,” Stream said. “I didn’t know how to be a friend to her. When the lease was up, I wanted to be away from anything that reminded me of what happened.”

King, too, was lost. “We didn’t really talk about it,” she said. “All of a sudden, this really good friend, I didn’t want to be around her anymore, and she didn’t want to be around me anymore. We both knew what we did was wrong. We didn’t talk to each other for a long time.”

But King never stopped thinking about what happened, and what might have happened to Stream. “I did all the self-loathing, the guilt,” King said. “In that 20 years, I thought about her all the time. It is not an exaggeration to say at least once a week.”

A fuller understanding

They traveled different paths, but King and Stream believe God’s grace brought them to the same place of healing and help to others. It took a long time and a lot of work, they said, but each found help, and in 2010 they re-found each other.

King recalls the days after the abortion, feeling an undefinable dread. “Why am I heavy?” she asked herself. “Why am I sad? Why isn’t everything normal? You’re supposed to go back to normal. Why do I look at my friend differently?”

“It impacted my mom, too,” King said. “My mom was always pro-life, but I didn’t know that. I have (since) spoken at length with her many times. She said, ‘I never thought to talk with you about it.’ She felt badly I had not come to her.”

King’s husband, Bill, and their two children, ages 18 and 21, know her story and are pro-life. King, who also is a volunteer firefighter and a former teacher and preschool center director, leads the pregnancy resource center. Lakes Life Care Center offers services including ultrasounds, sexually transmitted disease testing and classes to help mothers facing unexpected pregnancies understand what is happening in their bodies and prepare to raise a child. The center is affiliated with the Eagan-based, nonprofit support organization Elevate Life.

She shares her personal story with pro-life and other groups.

“When I tell my story, many women come to me and say, ‘That was me. I did that, too.’ It’s amazing how many are silent about it.”

Working at the center, she often hears men involved with a pregnancy turn to the woman and say it’s her choice. “Don’t say that,” King said, because that leaves the woman feeling she has no choice at all. “They are telling that young woman she is alone. It’s really sad.”

“I hope to tell young people that being pregnant is not fatal. There is help out there. We all know the path (we hope for); we want to dream,” King said. “You can still do all those things. You just need to take different steps to get there.”

King said she didn’t understand the full meaning of her friend’s abortion until she was pregnant herself. “I was married, I wanted to get pregnant,” she said. “But no one cared about my friend’s baby. I didn’t care about my friend’s baby. I needed to figure out what to do with this.”

The answer came with more deliberately inviting Christ into her life, said King, who grew up Lutheran and attends a nondenominational church. “I had to repent. I had to admit what I had done and ask forgiveness. That forgiveness is not just once and done. I have to believe that every day. I have to know it is true.”

Stream said that after her abortion, she returned to drinking and partying. “Anger and grief and sorrow and years of guilt and shame and depression led to suicidal thoughts and one suicide attempt,” she said.

She married at age 28; she and her husband, Patrick, wanted to have a child. Becoming pregnant in 1995, Stream carried the baby 10 weeks — the same age as the girl she aborted, whom she later named Aubrey — but she miscarried.

“I delivered our baby into my hands at 10 weeks. Every lie I believed came crashing down around me. I saw tiny toes, feet and legs, hands and arms, a tiny little rump and a precious little face. I did cry, ‘My baby, my baby.’”

In that experience, God reached her with the truth, Stream said. She and her husband found an evangelical church in Hudson. Stream sought the guidance of its pastor.

“I believed God never forgave me and my miscarriage was punishment for my abortion,” Stream said. “(The pastor) set me straight on that. My pastor prayed with me, and I felt hope and healing was possible. But there was a lot of work to do.”

‘Lightning in a bottle’

Stream attended abortion and post-abortion Bible studies, became active in the Silent No More awareness campaign and began speaking publicly in 2008. Most important, however, were the Rachel’s Vineyard weekends, Catholic-based retreats for men and women seeking to recover from the trauma of abortion. She began attending in 2009.

“It was for me a hugely important part of my healing from abortion,” Stream said. “I have never felt a safer place to share. You sit with people and their pain, sorrow and grief, and work through Scripture and apply God’s word to what you’ve been through.”

Stream’s experiences have been included in friend of the court legal briefs and testimony for pro-life legislative efforts around the country. “It is the No. 1 human rights abuse in terms of numbers,” Stream said of abortion. “We have thousands of babies made in the image of God who are not here.”

In 2010, Stream heard from King through Facebook.

“She shared her story,” Stream said. “She said, ‘I don’t know where you’re at. I just want you to know I am so sorry.”

King said she reached out to Stream two or three months after she began working at Lakes Life Care Center, in part to let Stream know she was doing better.

“We got together,” King said. “I had the opportunity to seek forgiveness for what I had done. She is a sidewalk counselor, a prayer warrior. We just laughed … It meant everything. I think it really solidified in me the forgiveness part of it. She’s OK, and (I know) she doesn’t hate me. Because she could. But she doesn’t.”

Now, the two women sometimes tell their stories together, including at a 2016 fundraising banquet for King’s pregnancy resource center that was attended by about 100 people. Stream described her experiences, relating that a friend had driven her to the abortion clinic. At one point, Stream told those gathered that she would like to introduce that friend — “she’s your executive director.”

“It was like lightning in a bottle,” King said. “It was eye opening for our donor base, to know people running the show” had experienced the same challenges as the many women and men seeking help at the center.

“I cannot say enough what it means to work with her,” Stream said of King. “To see what God has done in our lives.”

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Lakes Life Care Center

Founded in 1982 by a group of seven Catholic women from St. Peter in Forest Lake, Lakes Life Care Center offers pregnancy testing, ultrasounds, parenting preparation and other services.

It grew from one room in Forest Lake to three rooms a few years later, then to its current, full-floor space in 2008. It is affiliated with the Eagan-based, nonprofit support organization Elevate Life.

Jill King, executive director since 2010, said her mother was a volunteer teacher at the center when the leadership job came open. King and her mother talked about it, and King felt called to the position. King said its Catholic founders recognized the need to help women in crisis pregnancies and worked tirelessly to fundraise and increase awareness. Catholics continue to be the clinic’s biggest supporters, she said.

“I look to their strength with this, their resiliency in pro-life efforts,” King said. “If you don’t protect life at its most vulnerable, nothing is important. I’m hoping that we’ll be able to convince other churches. That’s the foundation of everything. I definitely appreciate how strong they (Catholics) are in that belief.”

Carla Stream, who attends an evangelical church and was on Lakes Life Care Center’s board of directors from 2014 to 2019, said she sends letters to various denominations offering to talk about her experience with abortion. “It depends on the pastor,” Stream said of receptivity to her offer.

There are at least 22 pregnancy resource centers supported by Catholics in the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis.

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ARCHDIOCESAN-APPROVED PREGNANCY RESOURCE CENTERS

Abria (2 Locations)
2200 University Ave. W, Suite 160 St. Paul, MN 55114 | 651-350-1154

2232 West Broadway Ave. Minneapolis, MN 55411 | 651-695-0111 abria.org

Alpha Women’s Center

(ICU Mobile Unit Twin Cities)
PO Box 435
Savage, MN 55378 | 952-447-5683 alphawomenscentermn.com

Birthright of Coon Rapids

11464 Robinson Dr.
Coon Rapids, MN 55433 | 763-757-0718 birthright.org/coonrapids

Birthright of Minneapolis

825 Nicollet Mall, Suite 702 Minneapolis, MN 55402 | 612-338-2353 birthright.org/minneapolis

Birthright of St. Paul

299 Snelling Ave. N
St. Paul, MN 55104 | 651-646-7033 birthright.org/stpaul

First Choice Clinic

1614 West Third St.
Red Wing, MN 55066 | 651-267-4357 firstchoiceclinicrw.com

Lakes Life Care Center

840 W. Broadway Ave. Suite 100 Forest Lake, MN 55025 | 651-464-4320 lakeslifecarecenter.org

Life Choice

118 N. 4th St.
Cannon Falls, MN 55008 | 507-263-8000 lifechoicecf.org

Northfield Women’s Center

314 Washington St.
Northfield, MN 55057 | 507-645-7638 northfieldwomenscenter.org

Options for Women | Chisago County

6344 Elm St., PO Box 516
North Branch, MN 55056 | 651-674-2121 optionsforwomenhelp.org

Options for Women | Cornerstone

204 Central Ave. E., PO Box 117
St. Michael, MN 55376 | 763-478-7367 cornerstoneoptions.com

Options for Women | East

891 White Bear Ave.
St. Paul, MN 55106 | 651-776-2328 optionsforwomeneast.com

Options for Women | St. Croix Valley

14563 60th St. N., PO Box 158
Oak Park Heights, MN 5502 [message in–BU] | 651-439-5964 optionsforwomenstcroixvalley.org

Pregnancy Choices

15010 Glazier Ave., Suite 104
Apple Valley, MN 55124 | 952-997-2229 mypregnancychoices.com

Pregnancy Options Life Care Center

18 2nd St. NW
Faribault, MN 55746 | 507-332-7644 pregnancyoptionsfbo.org

South West Options for Women

1615 Main St.
Hopkins, MN 55343 | 952-938-4496 southwestoptionsforwomen.org

Total Life Care of Hastings

1125 S. Frontage Rd., Suite 2

Hastings, MN 55033 | 651-437-4200 tlchastings.com

Wakota – A Guiding Star Center

1202 Robert St. S., Suite 14A
West St. Paul, MN 55118 | 651-777-0350 guidingstarwakota.org

Women’s Life Care Center

2870 Middle St.
Little Canada, MN 55117 | 651-777-0350 womenslifecarecenter.org

Women Source

1902 5th Ave. N., Suite 3
Anoka, MN 55303 | 763-208-0076 womensource.org

Woodbury Options for Women

1000 Radio Dr., Suite 100
Woodbury, MN 55125 | 651-340-9062 woodburyoptionsforwomen.com