By Mark Ellis –
After her dad, an experimental test pilot, was tragically killed in 1949, Priscilla Hurley’s mother found herself with four young children and a fifth on the way.
A grieving mom went to stay with friends in San Diego, and they assisted her in a trip across the border to obtain an abortion, then illegal in the US.
“She ended up being so desperate that she chose to go to Mexico and have a doctor perform a DNC, which is a dilation and curettage, a common procedure when women miscarry, but in this case they did (it) to eliminate the life within her,” Priscilla told God Reports.
Priscilla’s mother returned home believing the procedure succeeded. But a few weeks later was shocked by a surprising development.
“About three weeks later, she went to the doctor, and he told her she was four months pregnant.”
Apparently, the doctors in Mexico killed Priscilla’s twin in the womb, but she survived. “It was a miracle I’m here,” she says.
Priscilla did not find out the truth about her origins until her late teens. “My mother told me when I was 19 that she tried to have an abortion, so I was really shocked when she said that to me.”
“The first thing I thought about was no wonder I didn’t feel very loved by her.”
Her mother’s admission contributed to Priscilla’s lack of self-worth. “The value of my own humanity was never affirmed for me. So when I got to be a young woman, and I didn’t have a sense of my own value, and I got pregnant, it was not too difficult to say, well, they (babies in the womb) aren’t valued as human beings.”
Priscilla did the unthinkable and had two abortions herself. “I do regret those decisions,” she confesses. “I was very heavily swayed by authority figures in my life. The first one was my parents, the second one was the boyfriend. I regret that I didn’t fight for my babies, but I didn’t know how to do that, because I didn’t see them as human beings that were worth fighting for. I wasn’t even very good at fighting for myself.”
Compounding the tragic circumstances, Priscilla later worked in the abortion industry, going into schools to educate students about abortion. “It was more promotional than educational,” she admits.
“Much of my time was also spent in the clinic on days where they had abortions scheduled, because we did group informational sessions with the women that came in, and then we would have a woman actually go through the abortion procedure.”
She explained to each woman what they could expect. “I would stand over them at the top and comfort them and say, ‘It’s not gonna hurt.’
“That was a lie,” she acknowledges. “After Roe v Wade, I realized how horrible it is, because nobody, nobody prepared me at all, and it was horrific.”
The traumas that took place in the first 30 years of Priscilla’s life happened in the San Francisco Bay Area. “I think God had to get my attention, and he did that through a near-death car accident. That moved the needle a little bit in my own life to start seeking reality and seeking the truth about my life, about what I was doing, because I was still working in the abortion industry when that happened,” she recalls.
Even though she didn’t know God or follow Him, she had a sense that God saved her life in the accident.
After her recovery, she went to a remote part of Alaska to finish a graduate program. “I was thrust into this beautiful rural environment. And God does speak through the beauty of His creation. And I think my spirit started to open. I had Christian friends for the first time, but I didn’t come to Christ until after my third pregnancy.”
Suddenly, she had a different attitude about the life within her womb. “Nobody was going to tell me that I had to get another abortion. I had my master’s degree, and by golly, if I needed to, I would support this child. I ended up marrying the father, but it didn’t last.”
Carrying her son further opened her heart to Jesus. “God captured me when my son was born. He was four months old…At that moment of surrender I admitted I had made a mess of my life and asked Him to come in and take the reins, to take the wheel.”
“He captured my heart and that’s where I am today. He loved me through all these experiences and saved me.”
“My son’s 43 now and he has two sisters.” Priscilla also has 11 grandchildren.
As a new believer, Priscilla went through a period of growth and renewal with God. “I had to go through healing to be able to be forgiven for those atrocities that I had a hand in. It’s hard for women to forgive themselves for this horrible thing that we had a hand in doing. Some are blind like my mom, just fearful and responding to a circumstance.”
Instead of promoting abortion clinics, Priscilla now promotes pregnancy resource centers. “They are there to help women not be so scared when they’re caught in a situation. They’re there to give loving support, be the love of God and the love of Christ in those situations. If a woman is open, she’ll be helped and loved.”
Priscilla holds on to the hope she will see her twin sister and the babies she aborted one day in heaven.
“The God of the universe, the God of love, saved me in the womb. He had his hand over my little body in the womb because he loved me then and He loved me through all of those horrible experiences I had. He saved me out of all of it.”
To learn more about a personal relationship with God, go here
Priscilla may be contacted through her website at this link
