MILTON, N.H. (BP) – Paula Jean Page’s father was telling her a story. She was 30 and nursing her fourth child, who was just four days old, as Paula’s mother slept on the sofa.
Paula’s mother had been pregnant with their third child in 1953, he said, when their physician refused to see her because the family still owed medical bills from two previous births. Paula’s father, a carpenter, had no job and couldn’t pay the bills.
The only solution they saw was to abort the child, a procedure illegal in 1953. But her parents went to a place her father knew of in Maine. About eight or 10 ladies were already at the facility when her parents arrived as the last couple of the day.
Beds were on both walls of the facility, a medicinal, unfriendly, dark, oblong room. Women would come in, put on a gown, lie on a bed with no pillow, and await their turn for the procedure. The attendant would insert an instrument into the woman’s womb, intended to induce abortion within minutes, hours or sometimes days. Generally, the woman would wait at the clinic until the abortion occurred that day, and then go home.
“The abortion hadn’t happened yet. So she said, ‘Mrs. Valley, you’ll have to go home and it’ll happen over the weekend, and then you’ll be all set,’” Paula recounted her father’s story. “Well, it didn’t happen over the weekend. And a few weeks later, she felt movement.
“I thought he was telling a story about somebody else. And it didn’t hit me until he said, ‘And then you were born,’” Paula, now 72, told Baptist Press. “And I looked at him and I said, ‘This story is about me? How come nobody ever told me?’ He says, well, we never really found the right time. And I’m thinking, they probably didn’t want me to say, ‘Well, you didn’t want me anyway.’ Or ‘Your decision caused this deformed body that I’ve got’ and that sort of thing. I thought maybe they were trying to not hear those things from me.”
But Paula, who herself suffered four miscarriages before her first child was born, understood her parents’ dilemma, she told Baptist Press. She knew, based on her own joy as a mother, her parents loved her and felt it was providence that she survived the abortion attempt.
Paula stands as a testimony to God’s grace.
“They go in with instruments, and they pull the baby out or they try to grab the baby and start labor so that the baby aborts itself,” Paula said of the procedure. “But I didn’t. God said, ‘No, you’re not getting this one.’”
Paula is among numerous people who were born alive after their mothers underwent procedures intended to end their unborn babies’ lives. While complete statistics are not available, the Family Research Council reported in 2024 of 277 documented cases of such births, indicating actual numbers are likely higher.
Lyric Gillett, a single, 30-year-old woman who founded Faces of Choice a decade ago, features Paula among more than a dozen survivors at facesofchoice.org, showcasing the value of God’s gift of life. Gillett estimates there are tens of thousands of abortion survivors now living in the U.S., although the number is not confirmed statistically.
“I want to effectively hack the global psyche,” she told Baptist Press. “At the end of the day, whether you are pro-life or pro-abortion, when you hear the word choice, I want the face of a living survivor to come to your mind’s eye.
“Imagine you’re looking across right now from a survivor of abortion and you tell them, ‘I support your mother’s choice,’” she said. “But if you actually support that choice – and this is what I want culture to understand – then if you support the nature of that choice, that means that you are against the survival of the person who is sitting in front of you and staring you in the eye.”
Churches should embrace the need to minister to women and men impacted by abortions, Gillett said, and should work to change hearts and minds in ways that laws fail to do. In the Philippines where abortions are totally banned, she cites as an example, an estimated 1 million or more women secure abortions annually, with hundreds dying and thousands requiring hospitalization, according to several studies.
Faces of Choice advocates globally for life, having aired a commercial during the 2026 World Cup, after having been denied a commercial during the 2020 Super Bowl.
“We were able to air internationally during the World Cup final weekend and received incredible response,” she said. “But the next step is pursuit of this as a global initiative to hijack the global psyche and just to saturate culture with the understanding that abortion survivors are everywhere. I mean, there are estimates that just for surgical abortions in the United States alone, there are over 86,000 living survivors.”
Through Faces of Choice, Gillett is working to mobilize churches in promoting life and ministering to women who have undergone abortions. Already, 700,000 clergy members have contacted Faces of Choice, she said, as she plans to launch a global Life Choice Sunday during the 2028 Olympics.
“But a big part of why we’re taking so long in this and not rushing towards it,” she said, “Is because we want as many people to contact us and be part of this as possible. Everything will be fully supplied. We’ll have a robust network of resources. I want this to become the new cultural reflex, that the church is able to look at their congregation and say, ‘If you’re post-abortive, we’re not going to condemn you, but you need help, and we’re here for you.’ And then direct people to post-abortive healing.”
Paula was born prematurely at 3 pounds, 1 ounce, and spent a month or two in an incubator. She suffered deformities on her left side, including an impression on her face where her foot pressed in utero, an injured left knee that doesn’t bend completely, and a left leg that automatically bent up to her face as her mother changed her diaper, and swung out to the side when she began walking. Her mother swaddled it down to help it grow correctly. Later in life, she would develop breathing difficulties.
Doctors told Paula she herself wouldn’t be able to carry babies to term, but she gave birth to three children prematurely before carrying her youngest son full-term.
She encourages parents to consider the lives of the babies they conceive.
“You never know who you might be ending,” Paula said. “It might be the next president. It might be another mother that needs to raise four children, that wants to raise four children. And they’re my joy.”
