Born and raised in rural Alabama, Starr Rogers recalls her small-town upbringing as less than picturesque. Desperate to escape her dysfunctional family in the town of Eclectic, Starr married the first boy who asked for her hand at the young age of 16. He was only 19.
Starr quickly learned that the marital bliss she had expected to follow once she left her family behind was only a figment of her imagination, and a short time after her wedding she began cheating on her husband with her ‘insurance man:’
In an interview with the Christian Post, Starr recalls:
“He was my insurance man. I don’t know if they still do it now, but back in those days your insurance man would come to your house to collect your insurance money. That’s how I met him.”
Convinced that the insurance man would finally give her the happiness she had sought her whole life, she invested all of her aspirations in him. She gave birth to his daughter while still married to her husband, and even after her husband discovered that the baby was not his, he embraced the child as his own and forgave his wife. But Starr didn’t stop seeing the insurance man. The affair continued for ten years, and every two years she became pregnant with another one of his children, and aborted each one in succession.
She recalls:
“You know [it was] getting pregnant and aborting the children. Get pregnant, abort; pregnant, abort; pregnant, abort; pregnant, abort. I mean that was just the way it was.”
After he divorced his wife, Starr divorced her husband and married the insurance man in 1987. Starr thought that, now that they were together without being tied to other spouses, they could start their own family. But when Starr became pregnant (for the sixth time with this man), she learned that his abortion-mindedness had not changed.
“You thought it would have been OK. I could be pregnant [now that we’re married] we would have this baby and everything woulda’ been great, but no. He did not want this child.”
With two children from his previous marriage, the insurance man didn’t want to have another baby with Starr. But Starr desperately wanted the child. However, she convinced herself that the most important goal in her life was to please the insurance man, and she ultimately gave into his persistence for another abortion – but not until she was in her third trimester.
Unable to obtain an abortion so late in her pregnancy, Starr had to travel to Atlanta, and was scheduled to have a saline abortion. She explained the horrific procedure:
“It’s where they put you into labor. They inject the saline solution. What it does is it just burns the baby up inside of you and you deliver a burned baby.”
She described the Atlanta abortion mill as “hell,” saying that it was “packed” with women. Starr recalls meeting with a counselor before the abortion:
“They sent me to a room where this lady was and she started talking to me. She started telling me every detail of what they were gonna do to my baby and I just started crying because I wanted this baby. And she even showed me — you know they’re not supposed to do this — but she said, ‘Out here in the back is where we put the babies. She said, ‘That is where we’re gonna put your burned baby. And I just started crying, and she just comes over to me and she just starts holding me and said, ‘You want this baby don’t you? You don’t want to do this, do you?’ I said, ‘No ma’am, I don’t.’ She said, ‘Well, you just go back to Alabama and you have your baby.’ She’s just holding me. We’re both just hugging and crying, and I know with all my heart Jesus put this woman in there. I know that it was an angel He put in there because it was time for me to stop the killing of these children.”
Having decided to keep the baby, Starr went home to Alabama and delivered a little boy. The insurance man refused to come to the hospital for three days after the delivery. But Starr knew she had done the right thing:
“The night that baby was born it was just so wonderful. That baby, I had wanted him. After what I did to all my others, God saw fit to give me another child and it was just wonderful.”
Starr gave birth to another baby girl with the insurance man, and then another boy – even though she had a tubal ligation after the third. Her husband was furious that she gave birth to so many (live) children. Weary of his anger, Starr went back to her first husband who, incredibly, took her back. But it wasn’t long before she was unfaithful to him again:
“He took me back and we stayed together for almost 10 years. We didn’t get married, we just lived together. Of course, you know that was living in sin, so that wasn’t gonna work out either. I was just like the Tasmanian devil. I had so much anger inside of me. I wanted to kill everybody.”
Starr left her first husband and remarried again in 2006. But the weight of her past haunted her. Starr was a broken woman, traumatized by her past and angry with the decisions she had made and the children she had killed. She planned to kill herself, and even took steps in the process, writing letters to each of her children. But once again, God intervened in her life. Starr came across the phone number for a post-abortion healing line by chance, and mustered the courage to call.
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The woman who answered invited Starr to begin the post-abortion healing process, and even met with her one-on-one. The woman guided Starr through Scripture and led her down a road to painful self-discovery. But Starr stuck to it through the difficulties, and at the end of the journey she had been healed and transformed:
“I am a completely different person. I am not that nasty woman that I was. I am Jesus’ daughter. I’m His prize. And that is why I’m so happy because I don’t have that nasty anymore. I’m clean,” she said.
Still happily married to her husband of eight years, Starr has found peace with her past and feels blessed to have four beautiful children living on earth and doing well.
There are many women who struggle with the after-effects of abortion like Starr did. If you or someone you know has suffered from an abortion experience, contact Rachel’s Vineyard today.
