When Heidi Jenkins was in college in 1968, the country was roiling with riots, political protests, a pandemic, and a sexual revolution.
“When all the college strikes took place, I joined right in,” Heidi said. “I marched through Harvard Square yelling all sorts of things. I thought women’s lib was the best thing that came along since I don’t know what. I thought, My body, my life, my choice.”
So when she got pregnant seven months after Roe v. Wade, she made an appointment at Planned Parenthood.
“They told me abortion would be a safe, minor procedure,” Heidi said. “I went on a camping trip two days later, trying to pretend everything was back to normal—except it wasn’t.”
Heidi Jenkins / Courtesy of Heidi Jenkins
Nothing about her reproductive story has been normal. After getting married and struggling through infertility, Heidi carried to term twins conceived through in vitro fertilization. A year later, she conceived again, and—overwhelmed with twin toddlers and an often traveling husband—opted for another abortion.
“Instead of feeling relieved, I was traumatized,” she said. She was so miserable that when she heard Chuck Colson speak at a dinner, she prayed to receive Christ.
“I figured it couldn’t hurt,” she said.
It didn’t hurt. “I began studying the Bible, realizing God’s plan and provision for me and what listening to and learning God’s Word meant,” she said. She also started attending Tim Keller’s Redeemer Presbyterian Church and volunteering at a nonprofit that serves women who experience unintended pregnancy.
For almost 20 years, Heidi has counseled hundreds of women who have had abortions and are feeling the same way she did—If this is legal, why do I feel so guilty? Can I ever forgive myself?
They’re still asking those questions, even though the abortion landscape has changed. Since Heidi’s second abortion in 1991, the number of abortions each year has dropped more than 40 percent—though lately it’s begun to bounce back. One reason is the growing availability of abortion pills and telehealth appointments, both of which got a bump during COVID-19 and after the Supreme Court overturned Roe in 2022.
Through all those shifts, Heidi keeps listening to, offering resources to, praying with, and sometimes sharing Christ with post-abortive women.
“God got my attention by allowing me to experience this,” Heidi said. “He doesn’t waste anything. He is sovereign over everything, even our mistakes.”
Three years after World War II, Heidi was born to a stockbroker father and an artistic mother in New York City. Her birth was announced in the New York Times.
Both her parents were Jewish. One day her father, Alan Gage, received a New Testament from his boss, which led him to a Billy Graham event, which led him to Jesus. He began reading the Bible to his two daughters and searching for a church.
“I remember we took a family vote and decided to join a Presbyterian church on the Upper East Side [of New York City] where we lived,” said Heidi, who was then 12 years old. “All four of us were baptized and became Presbyterians.”
Heidi liked going to church. She went through confirmation class and publicly affirmed her faith in 1963.
Then she went to college.
Heidi enrolled in Wheelock College—then a women’s college, now part of Boston University—in the fall of 1966. It was a stormy year in America—James Meredith was shot while marching for civil rights in Mississippi, the military was waist-deep in Vietnam, and Time magazine was asking if God is dead.
Like many around her, Heidi stopped going to church and started marching.
“I got involved in the women’s movement in Boston,” she said. “I bought into the 1970s women’s lib propaganda hook, line, and sinker.”
When she wasn’t protesting, Heidi majored in education, fascinated by the new “open classroom” movement that emphasized large classrooms, lots of children of different ages, learning centers, and student-paced learning. After struggling in her first job in the Boston Public Schools—the administration thought she was a hippie—she began teaching in Stamford, Connecticut.
“A bunch of us lived and worked together,” Heidi said. She began a relationship with one of her male colleagues, and “ended up getting pregnant.”
Heidi knew right away that the timing wasn’t right for a baby. She wasn’t married, wasn’t living on her own, and wasn’t finished with her master’s degree in education. She couldn’t even ask her mother for help—Heidi’s mom had recently passed away from cancer.
No problem, she thought. I can handle this. She’d been to the marches—she knew it was her body, her life, her choice.
But the “safe, minor procedure” she was promised led to an infection, then a serious allergic reaction to the penicillin used to treat the infection.
Oh my gosh, she thought. This is God’s punishment.
“Although I eventually healed physically, I felt scared emotionally and worried continually that I’d never be able to get pregnant again,” she said. “I was full of self-condemnation and self-destructive behavior.”
Years later, it seemed like her worries were validated.
By the early 1980s, Heidi was a smart, successful advertising account supervisor in her 30s. One weekend, while in the Hamptons with friends, she met a young man on the tennis courts.
Bob Jenkins was also a smart and successful thirtysomething, already a vice president at a real-estate finance company.
Heidi and Bob Jenkins were married in May 1986 / Courtesy of Bob Jenkins
When Heidi’s friends nudged her, she told them Bob wasn’t her type. But a few weeks later they began dating, and two years later she married him at the Brick Presbyterian Church, the PC(USA) congregation where her family belonged. “Heidi Gage Is Married,” the New York Times announced.
Everything was wonderful: their apartment was spacious, their jobs were going well, and Heidi was able to become pregnant.
When Heidi miscarried the baby, it seemed like punishment for the abortion. When she couldn’t get pregnant again, it seemed like more punishment. Through several years of infertility treatments, including five rounds of brand-new IVF treatment, she kept trying—and failing—to carry a baby.
And then, finally, Heidi became pregnant with twins. Even that felt like nine months of punishment—the morning sickness was terrible. In her second trimester, she went into premature labor and had to take a drug that made her even more nauseous and shaky. She spent three months on bed rest, worrying the whole time that she might lose the babies.
At last, she gave birth to healthy six- and seven-pound twins. Bob and Heidi were thrilled.
“I still couldn’t believe God had forgiven me for my abortion,” she said. “I would frequently wake up my sleeping babies to make sure they were still breathing.”
And then, when the twins were a year old, Heidi was surprised by another positive pregnancy test.
Ironically, this pregnancy also felt like a punishment from God.
“How are we going to do this?” Bob and Heidi asked each other. The two-bedroom apartment that seemed roomy with two now felt cramped with toddler twins and a dog. Their neighborhood had no park that allowed both kids and dogs. And Bob had recently been promoted.
“I had four offices full of people—50 or 60—reporting to me,” Bob said. “I would leave the house at 8 a.m. and come home at 7 or 8 p.m. I’d go in on Saturdays for another 6 to 8 hours. I was going 90 miles an hour. . . . It was too much.”
The Jenkins twins / Courtesy of Bob Jenkins
Bob didn’t want a third child. Heidi remembered how sick she’d been, the months she’d been on bed rest. How could she do that with toddlers? Their apartment was too small—where would they put another crib? It took the twins forever to sleep through the night—how could she do that again, this time with three to care for all day?
“The first time I went to a private abortion doctor, I said we’d think about it,” Heidi said. “The second time I went, I chickened out. The third time, I chickened out. The fourth time, I finally went through with it.”
She remembers standing at an ATM, “crying as the cash machine spit out enough 20s and 50s to cover the cost.”
Neither she nor Bob felt relieved.
“We immediately regretted it,” Bob said. “We were angry at each other for quite a while.”
“It was obvious we’d made a big mistake,” Heidi said. “After the abortion we sold our apartment and found a bigger one in a neighborhood where you could take kids and a dog to the park. The twins went to nursery school. All the little things that I had been concerned about were basically resolved.”
Heidi was miserable. “I was completely traumatized—sad and angry at all the people who had advised me [to abort]. I was ashamed, guilt-ridden, anxious, depressed.”
The depression was deep enough and long enough that she got on medication. “I was probably unbearable to live with,” she said.
Around that time, Heidi’s sister invited them to hear Chuck Colson speak.
Nancy S. DeMoss was a New York City widow with a heart for the lost. She’d begun hosting high-class dinners for non-Christians after her husband, Art, an insurance millionaire, died. Many of them took place at the DeMoss House, a facility that primarily housed the ministries of the Executive Ministries team from Cru. Heidi’s sister Vicki worked at the DeMoss House and thought Bob and Heidi would be interested in hearing Colson speak.
They were. Bob had been in college when Colson was advising Richard Nixon, and both could remember his pleading guilty to obstruction of justice. They knew he’d become a Christian and wondered what he’d say.
“He talked about how he accepted Christ while he was in prison,” Heidi said. “Although he’d made choices he regretted, he radiated a peacefulness and a joy I was envious of.”
Heidi, who had been going to church and even praying occasionally, thought she was already saved.
“But Chuck explained all that didn’t make me a Christian,” she said. “He said we must individually receive Christ, and then we can experience God’s love and plan for our lives and spend eternity with him. . . . After he spoke, they offered us a chance to pray to accept Christ as our Lord and Savior.”
When she was handed a card with a checklist on it—“I have accepted Christ”; “I would like more information”; “I would like to attend a Bible study”—Heidi checked every one.
Heidi began studying the Bible and seeing a Christian psychologist at the DeMoss House. She wrote verses about God’s forgiveness on index cards and put them everywhere—on her bathroom mirror, in her purse, on her desk, with the dog’s leash (e.g., Ps. 103:12; 1 John 1:9). She went to Bible Study Fellowship and a Bible study led by Tim Keller’s wife, Kathy.
Redeemer Presbyterian Church was only two years old then—the same age as the Jenkins twins. Like Heidi, many of its early members were evangelized and discipled at the DeMoss House. Soon, Bob and Heidi were going to Brick Presbyterian on Sunday mornings and Redeemer Presbyterian on Sunday evenings.
“The first time I was mugged in Central Park, I was listening to a ‘love your enemies’ sermon tape from Tim on my Sony Walkman,” Heidi said. So when the mugger pointed a gun at her and told her to “hand it over,” she was relaxed. “Here—take it!” she told him.
The Jenkinses continued to attend Brick with Heidi’s father until he passed away. But they were increasingly uncomfortable with the direction the church was going.
“I went to a session meeting, and the motion was to have a pro-choice rally,” Heidi said. “I said I didn’t believe abortion was the solution. Only one or two other people were willing to say they didn’t agree with it either. For Bob and me, that was the beginning of the end.”
After Heidi’s father passed away in 2009, Bob and Heidi changed their membership to Redeemer. On Easter, Heidi gave her testimony to the congregation.
“A number of women came up to me and said, ‘I had no idea there was somebody else like me,’” she said. “I meet women in their 50s, 60s, and 70s who have never talked about their experience with abortion.”
Heidi loves to talk with them. So much so that in 2017, she received her certificate in biblical counseling from the Christian Counseling & Educational Foundation.
To date, Heidi has counseled hundreds of women, both pre- and post-abortive.
“Afterward, you’re supposed to be relieved and happy,” she said. “You’re supposed to forget about it. Well, that doesn’t happen for a lot of women.”
Heidi and Bob Jenkins / Courtesy of Heidi Jenkins
The feelings of grief and guilt can surprise women who support abortion rights. “They are often caught off guard and feel shaky afterward,” Heidi said. “They don’t expect [those feelings] because abortion is legal.”
Non-Christian women often come to Heidi looking for a way to feel better.
“Initially I thought I could tell everyone about Jesus, and they’d fall in love with him and feel forgiven,” Heidi said. “Well, even when I started this in 2005, it was not quite that simple.”
She learned to listen to the women, to try to understand where they were coming from. She learned not to be disappointed when most didn’t come to know Christ. And she learned that having at least one Christian woman in her post-abortion support groups is helpful.
“If there are several believers, and we go through the nine weeks of talking about God’s Word and what it says, sometimes by the end a nonbeliever will embrace the openness to believe,” she said. “I’m not saying it happens all the time, but sometimes it does.”
Over the years, female feelings of guilt and shame haven’t changed. But public opinion has. Since Roe was overturned in 2022, there’s been a softening among those who previously favored a total ban. More noticeable has been the growth of intensity among pro-choice voters—all six of the abortion-related proposals that will appear on state ballots this fall ask for expansion of abortion access. And where previously more evangelical Protestants said abortion is a “critical issue” at the polls, now more of the religiously unaffiliated say they won’t vote for any pro-life candidate.
The Republican party saw that change. This summer, for the first time in 40 years, the GOP released a platform that didn’t call for national limits on abortion.
Another change has been the number of abortions, which had been declining since the early ’90s. But around 2018, that number began to bounce back up.
While it’s hard to know exactly why more women are choosing abortion, the rise seems to be correlated with the increasing availability and popularity of abortion pills.
The pills, first approved by the Food and Drug Administration in 2000, stop the body’s production of progesterone and then contract the uterus, essentially killing and expelling the baby in two steps. The pills are cheaper, more convenient, and more private than surgery, and places like Planned Parenthood have assured women they’re “safer than many other medicines like penicillin, Tylenol, and Viagra.”
(To be clear, while more people do go to the hospital after taking an overdose of Tylenol, that’s because Tylenol is a lot more popular than abortion pills. The percentage of those hospitalized after correctly using abortion pills is far higher than the percentage of those heading to the hospital after incorrectly using Tylenol.)
In the recent presidential debate, Donald Trump said he wouldn’t oppose the pills. Later, vice presidential hopeful J. D. Vance said he supported access to them.
Indeed, taking a few pills sounds like it’d be less traumatic than surgery. But that’s not always how it works, Heidi said.
“From many of the women with whom I’ve met, I have heard over and over that the pill abortion can be the scarier of the two procedures,” she said. “Women are awake, often alone—if the father of the baby isn’t available or interested—and sometimes hemorrhage so much that they get into a bathtub because of the amount of blood. Also, some women have stated that they saw their fetus get dispelled in the process.”
Some of those women told her they passed out or ended up in the emergency room, Heidi said. “A few women have stated that the medical abortion wasn’t that awful, but very few.”
Since the procedure is more graphic, it can produce even more guilt and grief than the surgery, she said. She’s hopeful the suffering will draw women to support groups. Her own gatherings, while small, have been increasing since the beginning of the year.
“Because more people are talking about Roe, more women feel comfortable speaking out,” Heidi said. “I have a full schedule of meetings each week.”
If you ask Heidi what brought her to the Lord, she’ll tell you it was her second abortion.
“That’s the only way God could get my attention, unfortunately,” she said. “It is bizarre. But he knew where my heart was.”
She has seen the power of prayer and Bible verses, even to reach women who don’t believe in Jesus.
“One woman in the group said, ‘Why do I need forgiveness? I didn’t do anything wrong. It’s legal,’” Heidi said. “At the end of the group she was transformed, submitting prayer requests. It was a miracle.”
She often points women to verses on forgiveness—such as Isaiah 38:17 or Micah 7:19. “God doesn’t say abortion is a sin he won’t forgive,” she said.
She also repeats those verses to herself when she wishes again that she’d done things differently.
“I do see how God used my abortions for good—how my story has brought peace to women and led some toward Christ,” she said.
Bob said the same thing: “God takes our mistakes and uses them in other places.”
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