1960s feminism, abortion, and the occult broke her. Then Jesus saved her.

Candy Thompson came of age during the cultural revolution of the 1960s, when young women were told that liberation meant rejecting traditional womanhood and breaking free from the home.

She believed it.

But the freedom she was promised led her down a painful path marked by abuse, multiple abortions, spiritual confusion, and profound regret.

“The first abortion was after we had our son,” she says, telling Stuckey that her husband was not only not a Christian, but he was abusive.

“And we already had a son, and we were happy with him, and I thought well, this will be good, we’ll have our second child, maybe a girl, and I really wanted a girl,” she explains, though when she told her husband that she was pregnant, an argument erupted.

“The argument led to, you know, some words, and then he lost his temper and kicked me. He kicked me in the stomach,” she says.

While the abuse didn’t lead to the loss of her child, she was then “coerced into that abortion by feeling that [she] was trapped, that [she] had no other choice.”

She recalls the “dead feeling” that follows an abortion “and the horrible regret.”

“They’re having a regret, right afterwards, even though it looked like this was the best solution, you know, and instead they have the greatest regret of their lives a lot of times and just, you know, suffer for years and years,” she says.

Candy then got pregnant again and was made to get another abortion.

This is when she began “searching in other things to find answers.”

“Instead of the Bible and going to God like I wish I had, of course, I went to the feminine mystique at that time, and it just really, what it did is it just validated what I had been thinking, that I was a slave in the home there,” she tells Stuckey.

“I even went into the occult and read some occultic books at that time,” she continues, explaining that she was trying to “find the spiritual reason” behind everything that had happened to her and used the idea of reincarnation to “convince [herself] that [her] child wasn’t gone and [her] children weren’t gone.”

“We know in our spirit, we know in our hearts that they really were, they really are real. They’re our children,” she adds.

When she got pregnant a third time, this time she refused to have an abortion.

“I was determined that I was not going to be that slave anymore, that person anymore,” she tells Stuckey.

“We had the baby girl. She was beautiful. And I had always wanted to have a girl too,” she says.

However, after the birth of her second living child, she was placed in the psychiatric ward and had another abortion before finally divorcing her husband.

That’s when she began to go to church and met her second husband.

“I knew God had put us together,” she says, explaining that while her second husband was unhappy with her previous abortions, she was able to surrender her past to him and really start her relationship with Christ.

“My heart wanted to be back with God, and that marked the beginning of a long journey, of a lot of things, that God had to continue bringing me into more light,” she adds.

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