For my entire life, my birth mom was an idea. I knew the outline of her story since I was 13: a young woman, alone, far from home, who made an impossibly hard decision so that I could exist. I didn’t know her face. I didn’t know her voice. I didn’t know if she was still alive to ask.
Last October, recovering from a health scare and finally forced to slow down, I sat down with my laptop and went looking for my biological family again. My wife found an old obituary — one of my birth mom’s sisters — which led to more names, and eventually a phone number for her last surviving sister, Carol. I waited nearly a week before I found the nerve to call.
She picked up. I introduced myself – heart pounding – and the call ended abruptly before I’d even finished the question. The cellphone call failed, so I called back. This time, she stayed on the line.
I confirmed with her that my birth mom had passed away years earlier, but that in 1971, she had a baby. That baby was me.
What followed was an hour I’ll never forget. My birth aunt had raised my birth mom herself, as a teenager, taking in her own younger sisters when their home fell apart. She told me my birth mom had grown up 20 minutes from my childhood home, went to my rival high school, ran track, and sang in chorus. We had many things in common.
Carol told me my birth mom had left Pennsylvania lonely and joined the military. And she told me, finally, what actually happened there: my birth mom had been raped, and weeks later, was certain she was pregnant. She’d already decided, long before she came home, that she would place me for adoption rather than raise me — not because she didn’t want a child, but because she was afraid the circumstances of my conception would keep her from loving me the way she believed I deserved to be loved.
She never would have aborted me, I was told. She loved children too much for that.
It took decades, plus a one-hour-long phone call, to finally confirm the story I’d carried in fragments since I was a kid. Later that same night, I pulled up an old archive of high school yearbooks and started narrowing down the years she might have graduated. Two years came up empty. The third didn’t. And there she was — a senior portrait of the beautiful and resilient woman who had been faceless and nameless to me for my entire life.
I’ve spent years standing in front of audiences insisting that every unplanned life has purpose, that circumstances of conception don’t get to determine anyone’s worth. It’s a different thing to turn that lens inward, and after a lifetime, look at the actual face of the woman who proved it true about my own life. Nobody handed her an easy version of that choice. She made it alone, in circumstances no one would ever want, and it reshaped a family she’d never get to meet and grandchildren she’d never know.
Through Carol and subsequent miraculous moments, I gained a lot more family in a matter of a single weekend.
There’s always room for more. Love doesn’t have a max quota. I used to think my family’s story ended with the 13 kids I grew up with, biological and adopted, woven into one home. I know now it just keeps expanding. And because of the love my birth mom gave me by rejecting abortion, that expansion never really stopped. It just kept happening quietly, out of view, until one phone call brought it forward.
I don’t know how many more women are out there like my birth mom, women who made a devastating yet courageous decision decades ago and never got to see what became of their child. I’m a living testament to my birth mom’s resilience. It became a marriage, four kids, and a ministry built on the conviction that every life has inherent and equal worth. It also resulted in an unexpected phone call that would finally illuminate a life slogan in real time: everyone is wanted by someone.
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This is an adaptation from Ryan Bomberger’s new memoir, Should Have Been Aborted.
Ryan Bomberger, co-founder of The Radiance Foundation, is an Emmy Award-winning creative professional, public speaker, and columnist. He was the first of 10 adopted in a diverse family of 15. Ryan is the author of the brand new autobiography, “Should Have Been Aborted.” His books also include “Not Equal: Civil Rights Gone Wrong,” and the children’s books, “He is He” and “She is She.”
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