Society’s advice when Kristi Kollar became pregnant from rape at age 17 was to encourage her to have an abortion.
Getting ready to finish high school and pursue her dream as a New York stage actress, Kollar could have fallen sway to this so-called solution to her problems.
Instead, the young woman chose life for her baby.
“No matter how terrifying my situation was, and just because her dad was a rapist — none of this was my baby’s fault,” Kollar said, according to Aleteia. “There was this life inside of me, and it’s not my right to take it away.”
Her daughter, Adeline, is 18-months-old now, and the two live in New York with Kristi’s dad, according to the report. Between acting school and parenting, Kollar makes time for pro-life advocacy, sharing her story to encourage other mothers to choose life for their babies.
The Tablet, the newspaper of the Roman Catholic Diocese in Brooklyn and Queens, recently wrote more about her experience.
A senior in high school, Kollar said she was raped by a man whom she initially considered a friend. She and her father were living in Montana at the time.
“We weren’t dating, but we were close friends [from a youth group], and he would give me rides places sometimes …” she remembered. “So one day he was giving me a ride home, and then eventually, he didn’t let me out of the back of his car.”
Bad quickly turned to worse for Kollar and her family.
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According to the report:
A few weeks after the incident in late 2017, Kollar discovered she was pregnant. Around the same time, her grandmother passed away, her grandfather was sick, and a fire destroyed her and her father’s new home.
“It was literally everything at once,” Kollar recalled. “I was a senior, supposed to be getting ready for college. The assault happened, we were basically homeless, and it was the worst possible time to tell my father I was pregnant.”
Despite the hardships she faced, including rejection from her home church because she wouldn’t marry the father and no support or acknowledgement from him, Kollar still wanted to finish high school and keep her baby, saying abortion was “never a possibility.”
She gave birth to Adeline on July 27, 2018. Soon afterward, Kollar, her father and Adeline moved to New York to begin school at the American Musical and Dramatic Academy in Manhattan, according to the report.
Though her circumstances were difficult, Kollar said she knows the easy answer is not always the right one. She said her daughter helped her to heal and find renewed purpose in life.
“[Adeline] has made my whole situation so much better, because the healing came through her. If I had had an abortion and gone on with it, I would never feel okay to talk about it,” she said. “But having her helped me to get past the trauma, to grow and be able to talk about it.”
Kollar said she hopes her story will help others see the value of every baby, born and unborn.
“I’m very passionate about being pro-life, but even more-so now, after everything,” she said. “Even the idea that one baby can be saved by me saying something is so worth it to me.”
