Growing up, one of my favorite action heroes was Luke Skywalker from the Star Wars series, portrayed by Mark Hamill. This past year, after hearing about Hamill’s dark family secrets, it appears that he has much more in common with his character’s father, Darth Vader, than the hero Luke Skywalker.

In September of 2016, news broke that the girlfriend of Hamill’s 37-year- old son, Nathan, was pregnant. For most people, this would be exciting news, but not for the Hamills. Maegan Chen, a 30-year-old LA model, started dating Nathan Hamill at the end of 2015. Three months into their relationship she found out that she was pregnant with his child. She told him as soon as she found out. Hamill expressed disgust with Chen and told her it would be best for her to get an abortion. Chen had had an abortion years before and said she didn’t want to go through that again. The experience left her “suicidal and depressed for a long time afterward”. This is a common side-effect of abortion known as Post-Abortion Stress Syndrome. It is very similar to Post Traumatic

Stress Disorder, and there are amazing places that help women through this and contribute to bringing healing and peace to their lives. (For a list of locations and organizations, CLICK HERE).

“I asked him not to lie to me to get what he wanted. If he didn’t want to be with me, I told him, it was fine. I sent him links to read about termination of parental rights; I spoke with him about closed adoption. Still, he said abortion was the only way he would be there for me and it was for the child’s best interest.”

Hamill assured Chen that if she didn’t have an abortion, he would have nothing to do with her. He told her that aborting the child was best because it would be wrong for the child to grow up without a father.

“This began the most volatile emotional roller coaster I’d ever experienced. I felt lost, alone, and I even started to wonder if maybe an abortion would make everything right again. Nathan kept up the pressure, and listening to his words, it started to seem like the best answer. He said everything would be all right and that he would be with me if I got it done.”

“At seven weeks, I agreed to an abortion. Due to scheduling conflicts with clinics, I ended up getting a medical abortion, using pills. It was a horrible experience, and during the second day of bed rest, Nathan was drunk at a bar the entire time. I thought maybe I deserved that.”

“Then I learned the medical abortion didn’t take — and I now had a high- risk pregnancy going full-force. At this point, I felt the need to keep the baby. After all I went through, I decided it was meant to be, and I was happy with that decision. I felt the guilt of everything I did to this baby, and to make it up to her, I’d love her forever. “

When Nathan found out that she was going to carry the child to term and raise it herself he and his mother and father began to try to coerce her to try to abort again. The mother exchanged emails with Chen saying that her 30- year-old son was just “not ready to be a father yet,” and that she was being “selfish” to want to carry the baby to term.

She finally lied to Nathan and told him she got an abortion. Upon hearing about the supposed abortion, Nathan broke up with her and has had little communication since.

From the darkness and hopelessness of this situation, A New Hope was born. Baby Autumn was born in late October. Chen is now suing for child support. You can read her full story HERE.

 

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You might be thinking that this is a rare incident and that people don’t usually coerce others into getting abortions. I used to think the same thing, but unfortunately, it is actually quite common. According to a 2008 report by American Psychological Task Force on Abortion and Mental Health, between 30 and 65 percent of abortions involve feelings of being pressured to have an abortion.

So many people, like the Hamills, believe that abortion is the only choice for women facing unplanned pregnancies. So-called “Pro-Choice” advocates hardly ever advocate for options other than abortion, as seen with the Hamills. “Pro-Choice” advocates are apologists for Planned Parenthood, the nation’s largest abortion provider, who profits from abortions. According to Planned Parenthood’s 2010 annual report, 91.2% of their services offered to pregnant women were abortions, and for every one adoption referral, they do approximately 391 abortions. Abortion providers like Planned Parenthood even go as far as attacking non-profit Pregnancy Centers that offer many choices to pregnant women and do so free of charge to the patients. They have even tried to pass legislation into shutting down those centers. Why are they against these centers? Because they are competition. They offer many choices free of charge to pregnant women, thus taking away clients from abortion providers that charge upward of $500 for an abortion. Clearly, these people don’t really care about women knowing all the facts and choices to make an informed decision; they only care about one choice: abortion. That is why I refer to the “Pro-Choice” crowd as “Pro-Abortion Choice” or simply “Pro-Abortion.”

Howard Stone writes in his book, Crisis Counseling, that those who are in a state of crisis are increasingly vulnerable to outside influences and have less trust in their own opinions and abilities to make the right decision. Such “heightened psychological accessibility” can lead to a situation where parents, counselors, or others in authority can have enormous influence over a woman’s decision. Persons in crisis “are less in touch with reality . . . and more vulnerable to change than they are in non-crisis periods.”

It is imperative that women, during this time of vulnerability, know all of the choices available to them and the risks and benefits of all those decisions. As Gerald Caplan states in Principles of Preventive Psychiatry, “A relatively minor force, acting for a relatively short time, can switch the whole balance from one side or to the other—to the side of mental health or to the side of ill health.” We need to be that minor force that acts in that short time.

While in college, I led my school’s Pro-Life group for three years. My primary goal was to help educate the students on campus about the realities of abortion by showing them what the science of embryology tells us. We had an amazing response from the students over the years. One of our biggest projects was called the “Pregnant On Campus Initiative.” With this project, that the group still does once a year, we gather baby clothes and supplies from local churches and campus organizations and hold a baby shower for pregnant and parenting students. These students, who are often ostracized by their peers and professors, could come and get baby supplies absolutely free. We would also give them information about their legal rights as pregnant or parenting students. Some of our members even went above and beyond that and took a personal interest in these young women and became friends with them. They would drive them to doctors appointments, help them shop for their kids, and were even, in some cases, there in the hospital, when the women delivered the babies. But it doesn’t stop there; our members would even keep up with the women as they were raising the kids and provide help or offer to babysit the kids. This isn’t just a minority of people in the Pro-Life movement, as the media and Pro-Abortion-Choice advocates would have you think. Having worked on the national, state, and local levels of the Pro-Life movement, I can say beyond a shadow of a doubt, that is the majority of the Pro-Life movement.

It is organizations like that that people need to be aware of. Women, like Maegan Chen, need to know that there are other choices than abortion, that there are people who genuinely care for them and their babies before and after birth

I am overjoyed that Maegan Chen rebelled against her boyfriend’s family who tried to pressure her into killing her child. There are so many similarities to this situation and the Skywalker family in Star Wars. The biggest similarity is
that when times were dark, a child was born that brought hope to the hopeless. But instead of Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia being the children bringing hope and their father, the evil Darth Vader hunting them down, it was the actor who played Luke Skywalker and his wife and son seeking to kill their grandchild, who survived the assassination attempts and brought hope.

This story, and the family it happened to couldn’t have been written or planned any better. Of course, I hate that Chen had to go through all this, but I do not believe for one second that it was chance or coincidence that this happened to this family. As a lifelong Star Wars fan and a Pro-Life advocate, I see the ironic beauty in this, and I hope that this situation and possibly this article can help people to realize that there are more and better choices for women facing unplanned pregnancies.

“In a less-than-great situation, I did what I thought was right. In the end, I’m happy with that choice, and I’m happy to welcome my daughter into this world.”
–Maegan Chen.

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Originally published in The American Daily Magazine in December of 2016.