It should have been a normal errand on a chilly February day. Mary Jane got her groceries and drove home, where she started loading bags into the empty house. During one of her trips to the car, she heard a noise and realized there was a strange man on the porch. In an instant, he overpowered her, dragging her back inside to the bedroom where he brutally raped her. Looking back on that day, she remembers the paralyzing terror of thinking she was about to die.

“I was his last victim,” M.J. Lockemy tells people now. The attacker, a serial rapist, was out of prison on a work release program and had been driving around the neighborhood looking for prey. “I happened to be the one,” M.J. shakes her head. Weeks later, she realized she was pregnant. Married just three years to a man who had two children of his own, they struggled to know what to do. The doctors’ solution was abortion. M.J.’s husband thought they should consider it. “This child wasn’t conceived in love,” he worried. But should this tiny baby pay the death penalty for the crime of her father? 

“My mom didn’t think so,” Anne Farrens told a roomful of people four decades later. “She also didn’t know what the future was going to look like. She didn’t know if I was a boy or a girl. She didn’t know if I was going to grow up and be successful, or fail, or make her proud, or break her heart. She didn’t need those answers because I was her baby. She fought for my life, and she didn’t stop fighting.” 

So many people, including M.J.’s family, were shocked that she would consider keeping the baby. It’s a mentality Anne battles to this day. “I hear it all the time,” she admitted. “In fact, I just heard it from a guy on a plane not long ago. ‘I am 100% pro-life.’ ‘Oh, I’m pro-life too. I’m 100% pro-life — except in the cases of rape.’ Say that a little slower. ‘I’m 100% pro-life — except in the cases of rape.’” She paused. “I think what people are trying to say in that statement is that they have compassion for this mother. They have compassion for this baby. But what I truly hear is that it would be better if you weren’t here. My entire life over before it began. … No childhood, no laughter, no children, no memories.” The reality is, “If I [had to] choose between being conceived by a rapist or not being born, I’ll take my conception story,” Anne insists. “I’m really grateful to be alive.”

That doesn’t mean there wasn’t heartache in the truth. “That was not an easy thing for me to find out. My life has not been easy. My mother’s life has not been easy, and my dad’s life hasn’t been easy.” Finding out at age 12 that her mom had been raped took a profound toll on her life. “I thought our family was ordinary. And if you’ve ever had anything bad happen in your life, you know ordinary is good. Ordinary is where you want to be. That’s a good childhood.”

Processing the fact that her dad wasn’t her biological father rocked Anne’s world. “My dad was arguably my best friend. He was the coach of my softball team. He was in my life for every memory, every picture, every moment. I didn’t know that you could not be related to your dad.” But once her mom explained that she’d been raped, “those words turned my interior thoughts [and] my life black. Everything shut off. It was like the static pitch after a bomb.” In hindsight, Anne shared, “[It] broke me, because I really did believe [that I was] a mistake. I came from something bad — I am bad. And when you start living in a belief system like that, you spiral, and you do some dark stuff.”

Anne slowly cut herself off from her brother and sister, because it was too painful to realize she wasn’t related to them. “And I felt like everything that I knew was true wasn’t true anymore. I’m grateful that I was told the truth. I think no matter when I had been told, it would have been a huge shock,” she acknowledges. 

The next several years were a nightmare. She started smoking, drinking, doing drugs, and later, hard drugs. At 17, she found out she was pregnant. “And I told one person. I told my abusive boyfriend. And he introduced me to the only other person that I told — and that was a nurse at Planned Parenthood. She said, ‘It’s not a big deal. It’s nothing.’ I had made so many compromises in my life up to that point. What’s one more?” 

Her parents didn’t know what to do. “I was in constant trouble. No kid should call their parent from jail once, let alone multiple times. I was just on a downward spiral that I could not get off of, and that compounded the guilt of my mom [choosing] life, and I’m abusing it.”

M.J. didn’t know about the addiction, abortion, or abusive boyfriend, “but she knew I was struggling.” “My mom could have blamed God and said, ‘This is what I get. This is what the sacrifice brought.’” But she didn’t. “She kept the faith. She prayed for me every day. She fasted for me. I think it saved my life, because a lot of people that I was hanging out with during those years are no longer with us. The father of that baby overdosed. A lot of my friends have died, and here I am standing.”

Ultimately, she had to stop running from the truth and leave behind what she calls “the years of sin and destruction and self-hate. I had to bring it into the light. It’s the only way I could be free. I had to give it all to God, and it took me years to understand that — how to give all my suffering to God.” 

After that dark chapter, Anne started to embrace her testimony. She realized that she could use her story to help other people and speak the truth. “I did not want to have that as my conception story. And fighting against that was what made me sick. Accepting it and speaking about it now [has made it] a source of strength.” She travels the country, talking to groups like Live Action’s Women Summit and Young Leaders Summit. She reminds them that there are no exceptions to the value of life or human dignity — that even the innocent children created in cruelty and violence deserve to know love.

Would M.J. have chosen that horrifying February day? No, but as even she says, “I wouldn’t change anything because the outcome has more than made up for it.” If there was one thing she’d say to women, it would be this: “If you’re pregnant, I don’t care how you got pregnant or what the circumstances were. I would just urge you not to be afraid. There’s not any reason to ever take that life. You will be so much happier if you prevail and have your baby.”

Watching her mom now, Anne can only smile. “[She’s] so happy. She’s glowing as a grandmother because she said yes to life. She welcomed me as a gift. She trusted God in her fear. She protected me so fiercely, and she never gave up on me. All through those hard years, she didn’t have a regret. She prayed harder. That is courage. That is faith.”