Introduction | Taé's story | Katie's story | Erin's story | Vanessa's story

Katie’s story

First, a hairbrush strikes her square in the arm. Then he hurls a full can of baked beans – it hits her in the ass.

Running around the basement of his aunt’s house, Katie tries to dodge the onslaught of canned goods and blunt objects Drake throws at her.

Drake wants Katie to go out with him, score some crack, beg for money. Katie just wants a night off.

He picks up a butter knife and uses it to slice open her forefinger.

He grabs a jalapeño and takes a bite. He holds Katie down so he can squeeze the juice into her eyes.

It burns worse when she cries.

She’s trying to wipe the jalapeño juice from her eyes when he punches her in the jaw. Then the arms. Then the chest. He hits her everywhere, until Katie is a sobbing lump on the floor. He shuts the door quietly on the way out so as not to wake his aunt.

So ends another scene of abuse in the three-month barrage that has become Katie’s relationship with Drake.

In that time, he’s stripped her down and gagged her in search of hidden crack. He’s thrown a rock at her head, leaving a gaping gash in her forehead. He’s kicked her in the chest, sending her flying across the room and gasping for breath.

No matter what, she can’t pass out. He said he’d leave her there, wherever she fell, if she did.

She tells herself she can’t leave. He knows her phone number. He knows where she lives. He knows her adoptive father works nights — the perfect time for him to hunt her down and kill her should she abandon him.

She lasts three months in his aunt’s house. Forcibly prevented from taking birth control, Katie stops having a period within the first month.

One night, while working her way toward the house, begging people for money as she has at Drake’s insistence since August, she stops. In the middle of Kansas Avenue in Kansas City, Kan., during a frigid, early-November twilight, she stops. And she turns around.

Katie enters a nearby café and asks the waitress for a telephone. A customer sitting nearby lends her a cell phone. She calls her adoptive mom. She wants to come home.

In her childhood home, away from Drake, Katie can finally put the crack pipe down without fear of an attack.

Drake calls Katie two days after she escaped his abuse, his addiction and his rage. He declares his love for her, his regret for his actions and his promises for a better future.

Katie hangs up the phone.

She has an appointment at Planned Parenthood that day with her mom. She knows she’s pregnant and wants to see about getting an abortion.

She had decided long ago to have an abortion if Drake ever got her pregnant.

She would not bring a baby into an abusive relationship. It wouldn’t be fair to the child.

And she would not let herself be tied to Drake the rest of her life. It wouldn’t be fair to herself.

Katie and her mom walk into the clinic and wait 10 minutes before the assistant calls them to the back.

The doctor at Planned Parenthood is the man who facilitated Katie’s adoption into her new family as an infant. He administers a urine test. It’s positive.

As a favor to the family, he agrees to do the abortion right then and there, something that would become illegal two years later. Kansas now requires a 24-hour wait period before a woman can have an abortion.

Katie sits on the exam table and waits while the doctor sets up.

A few minutes later, she feels a small pinch in her stomach — the doctor tells her she’s feeling the vacuum sucking the fetus out through a tube. That’s all she remembers from an abortion that lasted only five minutes.

Her mom writes a $400 check while Katie waits in the lobby.

* * *

Katie doesn’t hear from Drake for seven months, until June 2006.

He calls, claiming that he is a changed man. He’s been to anger management and addiction counseling, and he wants her back.

Katie believes him. She moves in with him two days later.

He starts beating her within a week.

In the two months she stays with him this time, he puts a cigarette out on her left arm, tries hanging her with his T-shirt and punches her in the mouth so hard, one of her bottom teeth punctures her lip and breaks open his knuckles.

One day he takes her out by the railroad tracks. He thinks she gave head to a crack dealer for a score. He bangs her head, repeatedly, on the side of an old brick wall. He grabs a rusty rod iron and hits her over the head with it. He grabs a piece of glass from a broken beer bottle and places it at her throat, threatening to kill her.

It would be the last time Drake touched her.

The next day, campus police stop Katie for loitering and suspicious activity outside KU Hospital.

Her birth mother takes her to her birth father’s house.

It’s working alongside her father at a woodshop that she meets James. The two-month relationship leads to another pregnancy, a tumultuous break up and another choice she would make alone.

* * *

She’s been dreading this moment since she missed her period two weeks ago.

A trip to Planned Parenthood and two pink lines prevent Katie from denying it anymore. She has to tell him she’s pregnant.

James finally agrees to see her, despite their angry break up two weeks earlier.

They’re standing on his back stoop. She hasn’t seen him since the fight. She doesn’t miss the drugs or the pressure to do them, but she misses him, him and his wide, brown eyes. She catches herself staring and shakes her head to snap out of the memories.

“I’m pregnant.”

She holds out the pregnancy test and handouts from Planned Parenthood.

He takes them from her, slowly, in disbelief.

“What are we going to do?” Katie asks.

“Abortion?”

“Hell no,” Katie says.

“Well, what about adoption?”

It’s an option, but not the one Katie wants. She leaves, telling James to think about it.

James calls two hours later — he wants to keep the baby.

Katie is ecstatic. She loves kids. She still loves James. Maybe this time, being pregnant doesn’t have to be a bad thing.

But her phone rings the following day. It’s James, and he’s changed his mind.

“I can’t take care of a kid, man. I don’t have money for myself.”

The next day, he calls again.

“I want this baby. I want to be a daddy.”

He changes his mind several more times in the next four months.

Finally, realizing James wasn’t going to be the reliable partner she and the baby need, Katie makes the executive decision.

Four months into her pregnancy, Katie approaches American Adoptions to give her child the family she couldn’t provide.

As an adopted child, Katie knows the risks of relinquishing her baby to adoption.

Her mom, pregnant and unmarried at 21, gave her up for adoption to a couple that couldn’t have children of their own.

Five years later, Katie’s adoptive parents conceived, and Katie learned how to take the backseat to her younger sister — most recently when her parents opted to fund Ashley’s way through Washburn University. For Katie, they paid for only one semester’s tuition at Johnson County Community College.

Lacking money and motivation after meeting Drake, Katie dropped out after only a year. She was studying to be a high school teacher.

But Katie isn’t worried about her child taking second place with the couple she chose from St. Louis. They are young, in love and already devoted to the baby growing inside her.

* * *

Keaton Michael was born via C-section at 12:20 p.m. on Sept. 17, 2007. He weighed 7 pounds, 4 ½ ounces.

Four days later, the couple comes to get the baby boy, whom they rename Benjamin, from Katie’s arms.

Before they leave, they take Katie to dinner and give her a gold, oval locket with handprints and footprints on one side, a picture of Ben on the other.

It is only then that Katie breaks down and cries.

Although the couple agreed to an open adoption, promising to send pictures and letters and accept and save presents from Katie, this would be one of the last times she would hold Ben in her arms until — or if — he came looking for her.

She sees him again that Christmas, her last chance to say goodbye before Ben is old enough to remember.

* * *

Ben is 2 ½ years old now and, judging from the pictures and letters, he’s doing great in his St. Louis home.

He has big, blue eyes and plump, white cheeks. He looks a lot like Katie. A good thing, she says.

There are times, looking at the pictures on her Blackberry and on birthdays and holidays, that Katie regrets her decision to give him up. But the regret doesn’t last long.

“I think I did a great thing for him,” she said. “I couldn’t have given him the life he deserves.”

Now, with Ben in good hands, Katie is trying to get her life back on track.

After a three-year hiatus, Katie returned to JCCC last fall. But she could afford only one semester. Now she’s taking a break from school, working two jobs so she can move out of her adoptive parents’ home soon.

Katie rarely hears from James these days – just an occasional text message asking for photos of Ben. She’s sent him two and says that may be all he gets.

Drake is out of the picture as well. He tried to call in December, after his latest stint in jail for drug possession, but Katie ignored his calls.

Katie doesn’t think about the abortion much anymore. Now it’s only when she sees a picture of Ben that she wonders what could have been.

Distanced from the pain, Katie speaks freely about her experiences.

“For me, it’s kind of like closure,” she said. “The more I talk about it, the more I can put it behind me and not have to think about it as often.”

Introduction | Taé's story | Katie's story | Erin's story | Vanessa's story

— Edited by Sarah Kelly