As a young girl in suburban Michigan, in the nineteen-seventies, Rebecca Kiessling was teased for looking nothing like her adoptive parents. Larry and Gail Wasser were Jews who took the family to temple on the High Holidays, and Kiessling, a fair-haired, blue-eyed child, recalls people asking, “Who’s the little shiksa?” Her only sibling, an adopted older brother, acted out in grade school and later got into trouble with the law. In Kiessling’s memory, Larry would joke that “socially deviant behavior is genetic,” a reference to the 1956 thriller “The Bad Seed,” in which a psychopathic child turns out to be the descendant of a serial killer. Gail sewed matching mother-daughter outfits, but that did little to quell Kiessling’s feeling that she didn’t belong. She likes to recount a story about seeing the musical “Annie” and being transfixed by the song “Maybe,” in which the orphan protagonist dreams of her mother and father. When Kiessling and I first met, last spring, she recited some of the lyrics for me. “Betcha they’re good / Why shouldn’t they be?” Annie sings. “Their one mistake / Was giving up me.”
In a spiral-bound notebook, Kiessling counted down “the years, months, and days” until she would be old enough to legally access information about her biological parents. On her eighteenth birthday, in 1987, she contacted a local probate court. Soon she received a two-page letter from an adoption caseworker, which listed details about her birth mother down to her “reddish highlights” and “average” high-school grades but stated, “No information is available concerning your biological father, other than he was caucasian and of large build.” Kiessling recalled, “It sounded like a police description. I thought, Something’s wrong.” She reached out to the caseworker, who reluctantly confirmed what Kiessling already suspected: she was the product of a rape. She eventually spoke by phone with her birth mother—who asked that I use only her first name, Joann—and learned that Joann had been walking to a grocery store near her home in Livonia, Michigan, one night in October, 1968, when a stranger attacked her at knifepoint. Kiessling told me, “I remember thinking, Do I have this ugliness lurking inside of me? Because, after all, socially deviant behavior is genetic, right?”
Kiessling took some comfort in the reunion with her birth mother, writing in her journal, “She called me honey.” She saved a copy of a typewritten letter in which Joann told her, “I AM SO HAPPY I AM CRYING.” Years later, once the two had met in person, Joann confided that while pregnant with Kiessling she’d tried to get an abortion—twice—and backed out only because the procedure was illegal in Michigan. Pro-lifers sometimes dramatize the stakes of abortion by asking, “What if your mother had aborted you?” If you consider reproductive freedom to be a right, you might not be devastated by the prospect. “I was never mad at her,” an anonymous woman told the Irish Times, of her mother’s unsuccessful medication abortion, in an interview two years before the referendum that overturned Ireland’s abortion ban, in 2018. “It would have been much better for my mum’s mental and physical health.” For Kiessling, who says that she has always believed life starts at conception, Joann’s disclosure was essentially a confession of attempted murder. “My mom tried to kill me,” she said.
In the decades since, Kiessling has made a career as an attorney and a pro-life activist by leveraging her experience as a child of rape who narrowly “survived” abortion. Her main targets are rape exceptions, the legal provisions that allow pregnant victims special access to the procedure. “I believe I am the living embodiment of what is at stake,” she has said. A graduate of Wayne State University Law School, Kiessling is fifty-three years old, with a lean build and a mane of strawberry-blond hair. For media appearances, she wears sleeveless dresses in bright jewel tones, which she has read play best on camera, and threads her pro-life arguments with calculated emotional appeals. During a CNN debate with the lawyer Gloria Allred, who has spoken about getting a back-alley abortion after being raped in the sixties, Kiessling offered condolences for the loss of Allred’s “son or daughter,” adding, “You may not think that their life matters, but you know what? That matters to me.” Kiessling’s story is featured in “The Gift of Life,” an anti-abortion documentary narrated by the former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee. Backstage at the film’s première, in 2011, she confronted Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry, then candidates for the Republican Presidential nomination, about their support for rape exceptions. Perry later said that Kiessling’s story “pierced my heart.” A day after the meeting, he signed a “personhood pledge,” vowing to protect human rights from the moment of conception, “without exception and without compromise.”
For a long time, many pro-lifers accepted that it was politically untenable to prohibit abortion in the so-called “hard cases” of rape and incest. Ronald Reagan was President when Kiessling found out how she was conceived, and she has recalled feeling “utterly disappointed” to learn that he supported rape exceptions, as have all Republican Presidents since. The Hyde Amendment, which has restricted federal funds for abortion since 1976, includes allowances for victims of rape and incest. Gallup polls have shown that three-quarters of Americans support legal abortion in such cases, but purists in the movement have never considered exceptions to be morally sound. Kristan Hawkins, the president of the nonprofit Students for Life of America, has decried such provisions for “determining another person’s value based on something other than his or her status as an innocent member of the human family.” On her Web site, Kiessling calls out two camps for “standing in judgment” of her life: pro-choicers who defend abortion “especially” in cases of rape, and pro-lifers who oppose it “except” in those cases.
In recent years, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority has emboldened the pro-life movement to “ask for what it wants,” as the pro-choice legal scholars Mary Ziegler and Michele Goodwin have written in The Atlantic. In June, the Court’s ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization overturned Roe v. Wade’s federal protection for abortion without requiring state bans to include exceptions of any kind. To date, ten states have no rape exceptions. All ten include some provisions that protect the “life of the mother,” though ambiguities about what qualifies as life-threatening have left many patients deprived of urgent medical care. When news broke, in July, that a ten-year-old rape victim in Ohio had been forced to leave the state for an abortion, some conservatives tried to dismiss the case as a hoax. (A twenty-seven-year-old man was later arrested on rape charges.) Others have denied that rape can even cause pregnancy, a right-wing canard rooted in the medieval belief that women had to experience pleasure in order to conceive.
Kiessling has pursued the same ends from a different angle, by devoting her legal career to advocating for mothers whose children were conceived through rape. Her work centers on the rare but nightmarish scenario in which a man who fathers a child through rape receives visitation rights or custody. A leader in this niche area of family law, she has represented or advised several dozen mothers facing custody battles with their alleged assailants. From a certain vantage, these efforts put her in the company of such feminist attorneys as Allred, who specialize in helping victims fight their abusers. For Kiessling, though, this line of work is first and foremost a strategy for combatting abortion. She told me, “If victims know they’re going to be protected from their rapists, they’re going to be more likely to choose life.”
In 2017, Kiessling made headlines representing a Michigan mother named Tiffany Gordon, who’d become pregnant at the age of twelve when an older friend of a friend abducted and raped her. Gordon decided to go through with the pregnancy and gave birth to a son. Her assailant struck a plea deal and spent less than a year in county jail, though he later served prison time for sexually assaulting another girl. When Gordon’s son was eight, she applied for public assistance, which, under federal law, triggers a routine effort to track down the father for child support. In most states, the authorities can skip this step if there is evidence of domestic abuse, but in practice they often fail to do so. As a result, according to Lucy Guarnera, a forensic psychologist who studies rape-related pregnancies, seeking welfare can be like “poking the bear.” In Gordon’s case, a county judge ordered her to share custody with her rapist and to move within a hundred miles of his address. Kiessling, who took on the case pro bono, filed a motion to challenge the court’s decision, drumming up media attention with a rally and a petition that collected more than a hundred thousand signatures. The judge reversed his ruling, claiming that he hadn’t been made aware of the circumstances surrounding the child’s birth.
The most frequently cited studies, based on decades-old population figures, suggest that about thirty thousand women in the United States become pregnant from rape every year, and about a third of them choose to raise the resulting babies. Until a decade ago, though, only about half of the states had passed any legislation limiting the parental rights of men who father children through rape. Today, most states have laws that apply only if the father has been convicted. But less than three per cent of rapes result in conviction, and the majority of pregnancies from rape are a product of intimate-partner abuse. In 2015, President Obama signed the Rape Survivor Child Custody Act, which incentivized states to allow courts to terminate a father’s rights where there is “clear and convincing evidence” of rape, a lower burden of proof than “beyond a reasonable doubt.” According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, less than half of the states have codified this standard, among them Michigan, where Kiessling worked to shape the bill. She told me, “It needs to be public policy that rapists don’t make good parents.”
One week this past spring, I visited Kiessling at the Tudor-style home in the Detroit suburbs where she lives with her three teen-age daughters. (She and her ex-husband, a marketing manager, recently divorced.) Parked in the driveway was Kiessling’s S.U.V., which bears pro-life bumper stickers and vanity plates referencing her advocacy organization, Save the 1—named for the estimated one per cent of abortions that involve pregnancies resulting from rape.
Inside the house, which is furnished in shades of off-white and glittering gray, Kiessling sat at her dining table with Genevieve Marnon, the legislative director of the nonprofit Right to Life Michigan. The women were scheduled to speak that day at a conference for local crisis-pregnancy centers, the pro-life facilities that try to steer women away from abortion. In the meantime, they sipped herbal tea and puzzled over a flaw in the state’s laws which one of Kiessling’s clients was confronting. A young Michigan resident, the client had become pregnant after her employer allegedly raped her. She gave birth and left the baby at the hospital under the state’s safe-haven law, which allows women to surrender their newborns anonymously. But soon after the baby was placed with an adoptive family the man (who denies the allegation) made use of a grace period during which birth parents can petition the court for custody. Kiessling and Marnon were now proposing changes to the existing legislation, so that a mother would have standing to challenge her rapist’s parental rights even after giving up her own.
“It doesn’t happen a lot, and you hate to make laws for those exceptions,” Marnon said. But if Roe was overturned, she added, “I think this would come into play a lot more.” A talkative woman in her fifties, Marnon told me that, among liberals especially, “there’s this knee-jerk reaction, like, ‘Well, of course you’re gonna have an abortion. You shouldn’t have to have a rapist’s baby, right?’ ” Turning to Kiessling, she added, “No offense.”
Kiessling waved her hand, as if to swat away the label. “I’m a grown woman and I still get called the ‘rapist’s child,’ ” she said. “The people who say that feel women who have the baby after rape are betraying the cause.”
Although pro-life leaders are among the loudest advocates for mothers who were raped, the movement to strengthen victims’ parental rights has champions on both sides of the abortion debate. The Obama-era initiative was introduced by the Florida congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, a pro-choice Democrat, and it received bipartisan support in the House and the Senate. Lisae Jordan, the executive director of the Maryland Coalition Against Sexual Assault, led a decade-long effort to enact the clear-and-convincing standard in her state. Although she is pro-choice, she collaborated with the Maryland Catholic Conference, an anti-abortion lobbying group, to get the bill passed. But Jordan told me that she objects to Kiessling’s framing of victims’ rights as an alternative to reproductive choice. “I’m concerned that the Right to Life folks do not spin these laws as some sort of savior for women who are raped,” she said. “They’re not going to replace abortion access by any stretch.”
During the Supreme Court’s oral argument in Dobbs, Justice Amy Coney Barrett downplayed concerns that abortion bans would force women into parenthood by asking whether safe-haven laws “take care of that problem.” Kiessling speaks similarly about tweaking societal conditions to solve the problem of unwanted pregnancies. Part of a cohort of “pro-life feminists,” she portrays abortion patients as misguided victims. During one conversation, she quoted the Eastern Orthodox activist Frederica Mathewes-Green, who has written that a woman “wants an abortion as an animal, caught in a trap, wants to gnaw off its own leg.” Kiessling added, “It’s an act of desperation, and a sign that we, as a society, have failed her.” She suggested a “multitude of solutions,” including equipping student centers with high chairs and changing tables so that young mothers “don’t have to choose college or abortion.” I pointed out that, even in an imaginary American society that offered sufficient support to mothers, many women—and, perhaps especially, many pregnant rape victims—might still feel that they can’t or don’t want to have a baby. Kiessling cut me off. “As a feminist, I shudder to hear a man saying, ‘Oh, women think they can’t,’ ” she said sharply, adding, “What happened to ‘I am woman, hear me roar’?”
In “Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity,” the author Andrew Solomon writes that “many people see children of rape as intrinsically defective—including, often, their mothers.” He quotes one survivor who described her son, in testimony before the Louisiana state legislature, as “a living, breathing torture mechanism that replayed in my mind over and over the rape.” Lucy Guarnera, the expert on rape-related pregnancy, knew of no existing scholarly studies on the relationships between mothers from rape and their children. She told me that some women consider pregnancy “another trauma layered on top of the original trauma,” but others don’t, adding, “They don’t necessarily fit neatly into categories that score your political points.”
On Facebook, Kiessling runs private support groups both for mothers who’ve had children through rape and for children conceived in rape. She makes a point of keeping the two populations separate. “If there are some moms who say, ‘I’m struggling today—my child got angry, and I felt like I could see the rapist in his face,’ they need to have the freedom to say that,” she said. The group for mothers has more than a hundred members, most of whom are pro-life. Kiessling told me that, in theory, she welcomes pro-choice members, but that she’s seen pile-ons when mothers in the group express support for abortion. On the Web site of Save the 1, Kiessling features testimonials emphasizing the gift of motherhood even when it results from assault. “My sweet boy may have been conceived in rape, but he was carried with love,” one entry, from a mother in Missouri, reads. Tyesha Ahmad, a thirty-four-year-old from Michigan, describes her child as “my beauty from ashes.”
One morning at Kiessling’s home, I met Ahmad, who belongs to the support group for mothers. A veteran of the Army Reserves, Ahmad alleges that she became pregnant, in 2014, after an ex-boyfriend—also her former unit commander—sexually assaulted her. She went through with the pregnancy and gave birth to a daughter in 2015. “When she was born, I didn’t know what to think,” Ahmad told me. “Because this is my child, but this is also my permanent connection to him.” (Her ex maintains that all their sexual encounters were consensual.) After Ahmad applied for public assistance, a DNA test confirmed that her ex was the father and he was ordered to pay child support. Soon afterward, he went to court and won visitation rights. The judge assigned to the case hadn’t yet heard the rape allegation, and Ahmad, who is Black, with a round, youthful face, felt that he treated her as a “bitter baby mama.” Once, after she filed a motion requesting a list of modifications to her ex’s parenting time, the judge called her a “very picky, picky, picky lady,” adding that she and her ex were “stuck with each other for the next fifteen years, until this girl becomes eighteen.” Ahmad contacted Kiessling after seeing a news segment about Tiffany Gordon. Kiessling wasn’t available to represent Ahmad but recommended that she request a special hearing under Michigan’s Rape Survivor Child Custody Act legislation.
Ahmad’s romantic and professional history with her alleged abuser made the case especially thorny. At the hearing, which spanned two days last summer, her lawyer, Debra Kauten, presented testimony from a military investigator who’d looked into a previous rape allegation that Ahmad had made against her ex. The investigator had found probable cause that the assault occurred, but Ahmad had stopped coöperating with the probe, saying that she feared professional repercussions. Her ex’s attorney tried to paint her as vindictive and inconsistent, pointing out that, on the day of the alleged attack that left her pregnant, she’d asked her ex for a ride home from the airport. Kauten noted that Ahmad had received a diagnosis of P.T.S.D. and was seeing three different therapists to cope with the mental toll of continued exposure to her alleged assailant. In the end, the judge found Ahmad to be the “more credible” witness. In December, 2021, he ruled that there was clear and convincing evidence of rape and revoked her ex’s parental rights.
We sat on Kiessling’s living-room couch, beneath decorative crosses emblazoned with the words “hope” and “truth,” and joined a video call with two other mothers from the Facebook support group. Both have young children who they say were conceived in rape, but neither has succeeded in challenging her alleged assailant’s custody rights. One of the mothers wished to remain anonymous. The other, a California resident who asked to go by her middle name, Teresa, gave birth to fraternal twins after she was allegedly raped by a co-worker, in 2016, during a trip to Las Vegas. Her co-worker, who claims that the sex was consensual, now shares parenting time fifty-fifty. In California, terminating parental rights in cases of rape still requires a criminal conviction, but the Las Vegas detectives whom Teresa contacted told her that there was not “enough probable cause to move the case forward.” A package that she’d sent to the police, containing a red dress that she believed was stained with her co-worker’s semen, was returned unopened. During custody battles, complaints of domestic violence are often dismissed as mudslinging. After Teresa repeatedly tried to broach the rape during court proceedings, a judge chided her for conducting “burdensome litigation” and ordered her to pay almost five thousand dollars toward the father’s legal fees.
Even in states that have adopted the clear-and-convincing standard, victims face long odds. Lisae Jordan, the pro-choice advocate who worked on Maryland’s legislation, told me, “There are so many cases where you’re never going to be able to prove the rape occurred in a court of law.” Moreover, the laws usually stipulate that a court may terminate a father’s rights if it’s in the best interest of the child, not that it must. Lucy Guarnera described the legislation in most states as “very short” and “very vague,” adding, “When you are successful, it tends to be random.” To Kiessling’s knowledge, Ahmad is the only mother since Tiffany Gordon who has succeeded in using Michigan’s clear-and-convincing standard to deny her alleged rapist custody.
In an article published in the Georgetown Law Journal, in 2010, the pro-life attorney Shauna Prewitt blamed the weak protections on the abortion-rights movement and the medical establishment. Now an Assistant U.S. Attorney in San Diego, Prewitt conceived a daughter through an alleged rape in 2004, when she was a senior at the University of Chicago, and later fought the father for custody. In her view, pro-choice rhetoric positions abortion in cases of rape as “a matter of necessity rather than of choice,” ignoring the needs of those who choose to keep their children.
The women on the support-group call echoed Prewitt’s complaints. “The message should be ‘Punish the rapist,’ ” Teresa said. “Not ‘Abort! Abort! Abort! Or else you’re going to have to share custody.’ ”
Kiessling replied, “They don’t understand that so many of you felt like you had a little angel to help keep you company during your trauma.” She described children of rape, somewhat paradoxically, both as sources of healing and as lingering proof of their fathers’ crimes. “We do the hashtag all the time: #RapistsLoveAbortion, because it destroys the evidence,” she said.
At the end of the call, Kiessling left the room and returned with a matching set of the placards that she often brings to pro-life protests. She told me that she finds signage plastered with grisly fetal imagery too painful to bear. Her own signs are hot pink or baby blue, and decorated with illustrations of dainty infant feet. She passed one to Ahmad. “MOTHER FROM RAPE,” it read in block letters. “I LOVE MY CHILD.” The second sign, which Kiessling usually carries herself, was a gift for Ahmad’s daughter: “CONCEIVED IN RAPE—I LOVE MY LIFE.”
Last March, Kiessling travelled to Wyoming to testify in favor of a proposed state abortion ban with no exceptions for rape or incest. “This trigger bill here is perfect,” she told a committee of lawmakers, speaking from behind a long, polished table at the state capitol, in Cheyenne. As she often does, Kiessling cited the philosophy of fetal personhood and quoted the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal-protection clause, telling the legislators, “Exceptions are discriminatory.” But the rest of her testimony was a raw personal plea. “When you deny equal protection,” she said, her voice breaking, “you’re saying to someone like me, ‘I think your mother should have been able to abort you. If I had my way, you’d be dead right now.’ ” At one point, she appealed to the committee’s chairman, a Republican state senator who she’d learned was a volunteer fireman. Would he refuse to save young burn victims just because they’d be “a horrible reminder to their parents”?
Kiessling had testified at the invitation of the bill’s sponsor, a state representative named Rachel Rodriguez-Williams, who runs a crisis-pregnancy center in Cody, Wyoming. Their abortion ban passed handily in Wyoming’s state senate, but, in a final review of the bill, a pro-choice Republican had proposed adding exceptions for the “very egregious circumstances” of rape and incest. The amendment squeaked by, fifteen to fourteen, after one pro-life state senator was excused from the vote. Among the ayes was the volunteer fireman, who was apparently unswayed by Kiessling’s direct entreaty.
The following week, Rodriguez-Williams scheduled a video call with Kiessling to plan their next moves. Wyoming state law doesn’t yet observe the clear-and-convincing standard, and Rodriguez-Williams wanted Kiessling’s advice. Kiessling explained that, even with a criminal conviction, the existing law merely permits judges to terminate a rapist’s parental rights. There was no guarantee.
“That’s not O.K.,” Rodriguez-Williams said, scribbling notes.
Kiessling, who was seated at her dining table, offered to testify again when a new bill was ready. “I know you have a lot of men in your legislature who think that this just doesn’t happen,” she said.
Talk turned to the trigger bill, and Kiessling explained that she’d challenged established rape exceptions before. “What I need is local counsel,” she said. In 2018, when the A.C.L.U. of Iowa sued the state to block a new “heartbeat” law, she intervened in the lawsuit, filing a motion to remove the exceptions. “It’s like putting a target right upon us,” she said at the time. The judge denied her request, calling it “heartfelt” but “lacking as grounds for intervention.” Still, Kiessling told Rodriguez-Williams that a similar maneuver could be worth trying in Wyoming. “Otherwise, everybody’s just gonna say rape,” she said. “It’s like a secret passcode.”
As a law student at Wayne State, in the early nineties, Kiessling converted to Catholicism and wrote a forty-three-page “Philosophical Abortion Essay.” The paper, now posted on her Web site with a note warning students not to plagiarize, concludes, “It is an indisputable fact that an unborn child is a living human being since no human ‘fetus’ has ever been known to develop into a dolphin, a rabbit, or a carrot.” At twenty-six, Kiessling started her own family-law practice in Oakland County, Michigan, and devised creative tactics to protect “preborn children” in the community. She argued that a divorcing woman had the right to keep frozen embryos that her ex wanted destroyed (a judge disagreed), and offered free representation to pregnant clients who promised to keep their babies. In the summer of 1998, she read a news story about a seventeen-year-old in Alabama who’d sought a court’s permission to get an abortion without parental consent. The court had granted her request, but only after appointing a guardian ad litem to represent the interests of the fetus.
Kiessling was inspired by that case when she learned, soon afterward, of a twelve-year-old Michigan girl who’d been impregnated by her older brother. By the time the girl’s parents discovered the pregnancy, she was twenty-seven weeks along, past the cutoff for a legal abortion in the state. Instead, they made an appointment with George Tiller, a doctor in Wichita, Kansas, who specialized in late terminations. (A decade later, he was murdered by an anti-abortion extremist.) Before the family could go to the appointment, however, a judge blocked the girl from leaving the state, and prosecutors petitioned to investigate her parents for neglect. The case became a flash point for local pro-lifers, some of whom offered to foot the bill for an early delivery or to adopt the baby themselves. Kiessling, then working under her maiden name, Rebecca Wasser, filed a motion to appoint herself guardian ad litem of the fetus and said she’d found a doctor who was willing to deliver the baby that day, two months premature. Lauren Tomayko, a lawyer for the girl’s parents, told me, “She was a zealot. There’s no other way to put it.” The judge refused to consider Kiessling’s motion and cleared the way for the abortion to proceed.
Kiessling often cites the work of David C. Reardon, a pro-life author known for touting the unproved malady of “post-abortion syndrome.” In his 1996 book, “Making Abortion Rare,” he wrote, “We must change the abortion debate so that we are arguing with our opponents on their own turf, the issue of defending the interests of women.” Like Reardon, who has described abortion as a “painful intrusion into a woman’s sexual organs by a masked stranger,” Kiessling casts the procedure as a form of brutality. She told me, of the twelve-year-old girl, “More violence in the place where she was violated isn’t going to help her heal.” I asked Kiessling whether she might also have been acting out of a sense of identification with the girl’s fetus, or a primal feeling of rejection stemming from her own mother’s abortion attempts. Kiessling wasn’t surprised by the suggestion. “I’ve seen it over the years: ‘All she cares about is her—like the world wouldn’t revolve without her in it,’ ” she told me. “The most selfish thing to do would be to say, ‘Oh, at least my life was spared. Too bad for the rest.’ ”
Before Kiessling gave birth to her biological daughters, whom she has referred to as “second-generation abortion survivors,” she felt called to adoption, which she sees as another way of standing up for stigmatized children. She adopted three children, all of whom had tragically short lives. Her sons, a pair of biological half brothers named Caleb and Kyler, died of fentanyl poisoning in 2020, after taking pills from the same tainted batch. When Kiessling gives speeches, she often invokes their names alongside that of her late daughter, Cassie, whom she adopted at birth, in 2000. She’d met the biological mother at a crisis-pregnancy center, and according to Kiessling an amniocentesis had been normal. But Cassie was born with the genetic disorder DiGeorge syndrome and died after thirty-three days.
In a ninety-minute autobiographical film from 2008, “Conceived in Rape: From Worthless to Priceless,” Kiessling recounts Cassie’s story from an empty nursery, with a pastel-colored Teddy bear clasped to her stomach. She recalls that, when she first researched her daughter’s condition, “all I kept finding was how you could detect it in utero so that you could have the opportunity to abort.” Cassie had severe physical anomalies, including a hole in her heart, and went into cardiac arrest after leaving the NICU. Kiessling often describes fighting to keep resuscitating the baby against doctors’ advice, even after she’d suffered extensive brain damage. In the film, Kiessling speaks with a chilling sense of certainty that this was the moral course of action. She does a disdainful impression of a doctor telling her, “You have to consider what her ‘quality of life’ would be.” Kiessling recalls responding, “I don’t care. We’ll take care of her.”
One afternoon in early June, I spoke over Zoom with Kiessling and Joann, her biological mother, who is eighty-four and lives near Detroit. They were sitting outside Joann’s house in the shade of a yellow umbrella. In the years after her reunion with Joann, Kiessling distanced herself from her adoptive parents. Larry Wasser, whom I reached by phone, recalled that “things started to unravel” when he and Kiessling discussed abortion. “It led to her throwing me out of her house one time because I was talking about women’s rights, and she said, ‘You want me killed? You want me dead?’ ” In 2010, Kiessling had a judge issue Larry and Gail notices terminating their parental rights. (Gail has since died.) Joann and her current husband adopted Kiessling soon afterward. To celebrate, Kiessling threw herself a “baby shower,” with pink balloons and a cake frosted with the message “It’s a girl.”
For a long time, Kiessling hoped to track down her birth father, a prospect that alarmed Joann. “I don’t know why she’d really want to do that,” Joann told me. A decade ago, Kiessling saw a television special about John Norman Collins, a.k.a. the Ypsilanti Ripper, who is believed to have raped and murdered a number of young women in southeastern Michigan in the late sixties. She says that she persuaded an attorney to have Collins take a DNA test in prison, where he’s serving a life sentence for one of the killings, but that it wasn’t a match. Later, after sending a saliva sample to Ancestry.com, Kiessling connected with a half brother, who she says described their father as abusive and advised her to attempt a meeting only if she was in public and accompanied by a man. Kiessling decided against it. “One day, when he dies, I will look in his casket, and that will be my closure,” she told Joann. (Kiessling’s half brother did not respond to requests for comment. Her father, reached by phone, hung up at the mention of her name.)
Joann, a petite woman with cropped white hair, recalls very little about the man who attacked her. She’d been walking to the store to buy milk. It was about ten o’clock. The Tigers had just won the World Series, and ribbons of toilet paper still hung from the trees. “He cut my slacks I had on,” Joann told me. “He didn’t say much of anything. He said, ‘Behave yourself.’ ” The next morning, she burned her clothes. She was in the midst of divorcing her first husband, with whom she had a son and a daughter. “I didn’t know how I was going to support them, let alone another one,” she said.
At the time, abortion was illegal in Michigan, with no exceptions for rape or incest, under a state law dating to 1931. A friend of Joann’s sister had got an underground abortion at an ob-gyn’s office in Detroit, so Joann went there. “There was dried blood on the counter,” she recalled. The doctor told her that she was too far along, but he referred her to another provider, who issued strict instructions. Joann was to wait, alone, in front of a statue of “The Thinker” downtown. Then someone would drive her, blindfolded, to an undisclosed location. “I had to have a sanitary napkin and a belt with me, and eight hundred dollars,” she said. The night before the procedure, she backed out. “All I could think was it wouldn’t go right, and somebody would find me in a ditch somewhere, and my ex-husband would get my two children.” She gave birth on July 22, 1969, and drove the newborn Kiessling to a foster home.
Joann has mostly avoided participating in her daughter’s media engagements. “I don’t want nobody coming after me,” she said. But Kiessling has recounted her mother’s story often, emphasizing that, like Norma McCorvey, the plaintiff in Roe v. Wade, Joann eventually had a pro-life awakening. In 2019, testifying in favor of Ohio’s heartbeat law, Kiessling told legislators, “Today, my birth mother and I are both thankful we were both protected by law from the horror of abortion.”
When I asked Joann about her views on abortion, though, she sounded conflicted. “It’d probably be the best thing to do away with it, you know, altogether,” she said. She paused, then added, “I suppose, in certain cases, they’d probably still be able to do it.”
“Like ‘life of the mother’?” Kiessling asked.
“Yeah, like ‘life of the mother.’ I’ve changed my mind along the way because I don’t think abortion should be used as birth control. But there was one article where the baby was all deformed and had a bad heart. . . . ” Joann trailed off. “And some woman in that kind of case should have the right, because otherwise—”
“I disagree with you on that,” Kiessling said with a pinched smile. “Think about baby Cassie. You were just talking about her earlier, how beautiful she was.”
“She was, but she suffered,” Joann replied.
“She didn’t suffer,” Kiessling said. “She was loved.” Kiessling shook her head and looked away. She seemed wounded, as though Joann’s ambivalence about abortion called into question her maternal love. When I asked Joann what she made of rape exceptions, she answered without hesitation: “No, I don’t think for rape anymore, because Rebecca turned out to be a special person.”
Kiessling and I were talking by phone on the morning of June 24th, when I noticed a news alert announcing the Supreme Court’s ruling in Dobbs. She had been planning to spend the weekend at a pro-life conference in Indiana, and she gasped when I told her of the decision: “Oh, my gosh!” she said. “We’re gonna have the best celebration.” Later that day, she spoke at an impromptu rally of anti-abortion activists outside the Michigan Hall of Justice, in Lansing. She was carrying one of her signs and wore a dress in a matching shade of pink. Gesturing toward her high heels, which were bedazzled with the words “BAM!” and “POW!,” she told the crowd, “You’re superheroes—you save lives.”
But Kiessling went on to call the victory “bittersweet.” Once Roe was overturned, pro-lifers in Michigan had hoped to see prosecutors enforce the old abortion ban. “I literally owe my birth to that 1931 law,” Kiessling said. In anticipation of Dobbs, though, Planned Parenthood of Michigan had sued to block the law’s enforcement, resulting in a temporary injunction.
A record number of states placed abortion measures on the ballot this year. In the first referendum of its kind since Dobbs, in August, Kansans overwhelmingly rejected a pro-life amendment to the state’s constitution. In Michigan, the Democratic governor, Gretchen Whitmer, who was running for a second term, urged voters in the midterms to support Proposal 3, a measure to enshrine freedoms in the state’s constitution, including “all decisions about pregnancy.” Kiessling spent the fall touring Michigan to mobilize the opposition, giving speeches at prayer rallies and, outside one Detroit church, at a graveside vigil for what a tombstone called “unborn babies murdered in the holocaust of abortion.” But, as in every state facing ballot measures, voters in Michigan chose to protect access to the procedure. Whitmer won reëlection, and Proposal 3 passed by a comfortable margin. Democrats also flipped both chambers of the state legislature, giving the Party complete control for the first time since 1983.
The day after the elections, Kiessling wrote on Facebook that Michigan was set to become “as bad as New York and California,” adding, “It’s going to be very dark, very evil, very ugly.” For Kiessling, though, the success of Dobbs and the setback of the midterms are two wayposts in a struggle that will stretch on for as long as it needs to. “Child sacrifice was going on since the days of antiquity,” she told me. “There’s always been a battle for life. It’s gone on for thousands of years, and I think it’s never gonna end.” She spoke hopefully of a future, a few decades from now, when infants who have yet to be conceived will come of age to discover that post-Dobbs abortion bans protected them, just as the Michigan law protected her. Their mothers may not have wanted to give birth, but they will love their babies in the end. “I think it’ll be hard to deny this whole generation of children who will be born,” Kiessling said. She added, “You can’t deny a person’s life. Their story.” ♦
