Father by Kirsten Snyder

My biological father is serving a life sentence in prison.

Included in his crimes is rape.

My father is a rapist.

I heard the violent and scary stories about my father. He kidnapped me when they split up; all I think I can remember is crying and being in the vehicle. He tried contacting me on one of my birthdays. I carefully listened in on the phone when my mom's face turned white and she rushed in her bedroom. A triumphal occasion when I was twenty-two and purchased my first house turned sour when I started receiving gradually, increasingly insane letters from prison from him. Even as I write this, I am scared to share too much.

I spent a number of years from childhood through young adult wondering what parts of me were from my father. I was the only one in my family with blue eyes, and I knew my “ugly feet” came from him. I was told he was one of those people who was so smart that he was crazy. To me, that meant be smart, but don't be so smart that it turns you crazy. Those awkward teen years of being hyper and goofy gave me warnings: be fun, but not too much that it turns you crazy. Basically, anything that wasn't strictly walking a line was one step closer to becoming the mad man that was inside of me.

I used to believe in the pro-choice stance of giving exceptions for rape and incest. Then I heard the dehumanizing pro-choice voices about “the child conceived in rape.” I remember seeing a “Dateline” show, or maybe it was “20/20 ,” about a girl who was adopted out of prison and lived in the shadow of her insane mother who had shot and killed her siblings. I understood her. While I knew I had part of my own father, this evil person, inside of me, I felt I had conducted myself in society pretty well up until that point. I mean, I was a hard worker, good in school, not a drain on anyone (like this is my measurement as a person). Surely, those children born out of rape could be similar. Plus, I had never really connected my father’s evil deeds to me, as his product. While I was fearful of being his, I fought against the idea that I was his bad product. This is where my ideals of pro-choice exceptions didn’t line up.

The voices about the “child of a rapist” angered me. I am not my father's daughter. I am not my father. I am not my father's daughter. It took me several years to figure out (and I still continue to work through it from different angles) who I was.

Here, I could give you many Scriptures that speak about the new creation in Christ. These were healing waters for me. I was not destined to be the creation of a monster. Still, the almighty gods of science and society were screaming the nature-over-nurture chant, and their cries lingered in my mind. New discoveries were being made, however. The Human Genome Project found that, while we share up to 99% of the same DNA with apes, there is a large difference on how our genes regulate themselves. To put it plainly, humans have a vastly higher percentage of changeable genes, while apes have more rigid genes. This led me to geek out on the study of epigenetics. Now, science was saying the opposite: that you are not bound entirely by your DNA. I was not bound, and like a doubting Thomas, I could now fully trust that God's Word was true.

Some in the pro-choice community would say, So you are a child of a rapist, but were you conceived in rape?

Will the answer to that question change anything about my value?