Ep 1133 ｜ Birth Control Made Her Blind; IVF Made Her Pro-Life ｜ Guest： Chelsey Painter Davis
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
185.40251
Summary
Chelsea Painter Davis is known as TheBlindMom on her podcast and on Insta. She has an incredible testimony of how she has trusted the Lord through many challenges. She became blinded by hormonal birth control when she was 19 years old. Fast forward a few years when her son was born, she was pressured for weeks and weeks by her doctor to have an abortion. She s such a unique look on life, not only because of her blindness and her pregnancy complications, but also because of the circumstances surrounding her conception. She describes herself as an IVF survivor. Her look on the sanctity of life and the faithfulness of the Lord is so refreshing and encouraging. This episode is brought to you by GoodRanchers.
Transcript
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Chelsea Painter Davis is known as The Blind Mom on her podcast and on Instagram.
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She has an incredible testimony of how she has trusted the Lord through many challenges.
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She became blinded by hormonal birth control when she was 19 years old.
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Fast forward a few years when she was pregnant with her son.
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She was pressured for weeks and weeks by her doctor to have an abortion.
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She has such a unique look on life, not only because of her blindness and her pregnancy
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complications, but also because of the circumstances surrounding her conception.
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She is an IVF baby and describes herself as an IVF survivor.
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Her look on the sanctity of life and the faithfulness of the Lord is so refreshing and encouraging.
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You're going to love this conversation with Chelsea.
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This episode is brought to you by our friends at Good Ranchers.
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Chelsea, thanks so much for taking the time to join me.
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Always have people send me your videos and they're so fun.
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That's kind of like the moniker that you're known by on Instagram, the blind mom.
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So tell me a little bit about like why you started your page, why you started your podcast.
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I have always been a huge pro-life enthusiast and I just never really felt like I could do much about it.
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But as I've gone through my life, I have racked up quite a challenging testimony and I just really saw opportunity with now that I've healed through a lot of these things, how I could use them to point not just to my pro-life ethic that I get from my faith, but also how this really applies to all the decisions that you make in your life.
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Like don't give up on your life just because it's difficult and I really saw an opportunity there to share.
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I was like, I don't really know what I'm doing.
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But the more that we've started making videos and putting things out there, it's just it's really good to see how people are hungry for just that encouragement.
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Like just because you're pregnant and in crisis, like your life is not over, like we can handle this, you can get through this just because you had a horrible accident and now you're disabled for the rest of your life.
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Like you can do this and people really need to hear that.
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And all of these things are a part of your story.
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So I just hit my 10 year anniversary this past Christmas.
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But there's only so much you can there's only so much you can be OK with when you grew up one way, thought you were going to spend the rest of your life like that.
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And then you get hit with near total blindness.
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So I started taking birth control pills because that's what all the little good Protestant girls do.
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Or so I thought when you're about to get married, I sat down with my primary care physician, discussed what my options were.
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I had done some research myself because I was very exposed to pro-life issues, pro-life ethics.
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Growing up a survivor of IVF, I just I wasn't afraid of these topics.
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And so I had noticed online they were saying sometimes birth control pills can cause the lining in your uterus to thin and that can accidentally keep the embryo or the zygote from attaching.
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So I wanted to have a real conversation with my primary care physician.
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When I came in, I was like, I want to choose something that's like safe, something that's effective and something that's ethical.
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And she was not interested in having that conversation with me.
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I felt really belittled just by something as simple as facial expressions.
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When I was talking to her, it really felt like she just wanted me to take the prescription and leave.
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She didn't want to discuss what that medication would actually do to my reproductive system.
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Or the embryo, because what you're saying, and some people don't know this, we've talked about this on the show too, but birth control, any kind of hormonal birth control might not actually prevent you from becoming pregnant.
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It might not prevent the fertilization of an egg.
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It's supposed to prevent ovulation, but it doesn't always.
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So what can happen is that fertilized egg, because you're on birth control, because like you said, the lining of the uterus is being thinned, that embryo, that fertilized egg just can't attach to the wall.
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It's preventing not the fertilization, but the implantation in that case.
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And if we believe, as we do, that life starts at conception at that point of fertilization, then that means that hormonal birth control has the potential to be abortifacient, which is where the ethical concerns rightly come in.
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The Catholic Church has always been like super strong and clear on that.
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There was like less guidance on that growing up.
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And so it just seems like you were trying to understand, okay, because you said you're about to get married at that point.
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You were just trying to understand like, okay, I want birth control, but I also have these concerns and the doctor wasn't super helpful.
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And now as an adult looking back on it, I think she didn't know.
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And that's where those weird facial expressions were coming from.
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But in my teenager mind, I felt like I was being judged.
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I felt like she was looking at me like I was stupid.
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And so I just said, whatever, just give me the pills.
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Like at that point, I'm sitting in a doctor's office with puppy stickers on the wall and my mom and a nurse practitioner staring at me, talking to me about sex.
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I didn't want to have that conversation anymore.
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I was like, okay, well, it's not that big of a deal.
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Like it's not like I'm causing any problems with the baby right now.
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Like it's not even possible for me to be pregnant right now.
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But next time I see that PCP, I'm going to ask, I'm going to push her.
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And I'm just going to find something different.
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But before I could do that, I ended up in the hospital with a pulmonary embolism.
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How many, how long had you been taking birth control at that point?
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And that is also a potential side effect of hormonal birth control that a lot of people
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It was something that got run through very quickly, the possible side effects of the
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But you see like heart attack, pulmonary embolism, stroke, death, pain.
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You don't take that seriously, especially when you're only 18, 19 years old.
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Even though I just had a friend die from taking hormonal birth control, you still just don't
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She died before the paramedics could get there.
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And, but for some reason you still think like, oh, that's a fluke.
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That doesn't mean there's something wrong with birth control.
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That just means, oh, well, there was something wrong in her body that would never happen to
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That's why I say I'm lucky I didn't die like she did.
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They realized that I had blood clotting disorders and combined with the birth control pills.
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But I started getting headaches after and I went to see that same PCP and I said, hey,
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I just had my wedding and Tylenol won't cut it.
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And the same kind of attitude of like, I really kind of need you to leave this office.
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She just looks at me and she's like, okay, Chelsea, you need to understand that issue
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You need to cut a few college classes and go get a massage.
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And that appointment, I just completely shut down on myself.
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I really genuinely thought I had just been over dramatizing it.
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Um, I'd had, I mean, planning a wedding is very stressful.
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It's, it's very hard to get married at 19 years old because everybody thinks that it's
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And so I just completely thought everything she was saying to me was true.
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And now looking back, one of the biggest regrets in my life is that my husband knew something
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was wrong and he begged me to go to the emergency room when these headaches wouldn't go away.
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Like I was standing up and I would vomit trying to go to class.
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And I just, I just told my husband, I said, I'm not going to go back to the hospital and
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So you didn't consider just like stopping the birth control pills on your own?
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I had stopped the birth control pills after the pulmonary embolism.
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So once you throw a clot from birth control pills, the immediate standard of care is that
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you do not take hormonal birth control ever again.
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And then especially combined with my blood clotting disorders, I'm on anticoagulants for
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So the absolute worst thing I could do is add in hormonal birth control.
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So this is just side effects from having taken it at all.
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I didn't realize how bad my vision was deteriorating because I kept making up excuses.
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I was like, oh, well, we just moved into this new studio apartment and it's just really
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Like there's not a lot of windows, you know, we're kind of poor.
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And it wasn't until my mom came to visit me for Thanksgiving and we were setting up the
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Christmas tree because I'm that kind of person.
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She asked me to hand her the purple Christmas ornament and I was holding two of them and
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And that's when we knew something was very, very wrong.
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I just, there's really two phases of denial for blindness.
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Number one is that there's anything wrong with your vision at all.
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And then number two, it's that this is going to be permanent.
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So I fully went to the doctor thinking that they were going to fix me.
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They were going to give me some pill or something or, and I was going to be fine.
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But I ended up having pseudotumor cerebri, which is a buildup of cerebral spinal fluid that
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And because I was so delayed in coming to get a proper diagnosis, there was nothing they
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I, the first round of treatment they tried, which is a diuretic, did nothing.
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And secondly, they put a drain in my spine to get rid of that extra fluid.
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I lost all this vision within a matter of a few months.
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And the whole time I was in the doctor, they were blaming me.
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They're saying like, well, this just happens to women in their 20s who are overweight.
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Like, we don't know why, but it's just women like you get this.
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Like, we have no idea, but that's just how it is.
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And maybe if you hadn't eaten so many cupcakes, this wouldn't happen to you.
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And once again, like, why would I not believe my doctor?
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My doctor is supposed to be telling me the truth.
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But as soon as I went home and they washed their hands of me medically, I started seeing
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all these lawsuits on the television, listening to it.
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And they were like, have you been blinded by pseudotumor cerebri?
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And the more I looked into it, birth control companies found out in their clinical trials
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that their medication was causing pseudotumor cerebri, and they just decided not to put it
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I know that, you know, I was taking a birth control pill, again, like, it was not for,
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It was like, all of my friends were told we had, like, PCOS or if our, like, period was
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just, like, a little bit delayed when we were 17.
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Even if we weren't sexually active, which we were not.
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But I was put on Yaz because that's what everyone was.
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And now I see those commercials, like, if you took Yaz and then you got, like, a breast
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And it's like, I don't even remember hearing any potential side effects of those.
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And I wasn't on it for very long because I just realized I don't need this and it doesn't
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But, I mean, there are women who are on those for years and years and years and never know
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that the reason that they're feeling bad is because their hormones are jacked up or whatever
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And I feel like the doctors are so invested in protecting birth control just as a whole
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industry that they're not really sitting there and being honest with you.
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It took about a year after my symptoms started for me to sit down with my hematologist, my new
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And he said, do you realize when he was taking my patient history, he's like, you realize that
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you didn't have any problems with you until you started taking those birth control pills.
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And once you started taking them, you were hospitalized four times in one year.
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Your body went, it was wrecked as soon as you started taking those.
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And I was, by that point, I was like, yeah, I started to figure that out.
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But when I was going through the process with the neuro-ophthalmologist, with the primary
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care physician who prescribed me the birth controls in the first place, they're not bringing
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And in a way, like, I almost kind of understand because the birth control companies did lie
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and they refused to put it on the warning labels.
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But at the same time, how many doctors actually read those warning labels?
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Do they really know what they're prescribing to you?
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And unfortunately for me, it had lasting permanent side effects.
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So is it confirmed that the blindness was caused by the birth control?
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That's what the first doctors were trying to tell me.
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But there is a lot of information online about how it is connected to birth control pills
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And it makes so much sense because when he's telling me like, you just, it just happens to
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And I was like, you mean people who are on birth control?
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It's a very interesting correlation you're suggesting there.
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But I even watched, um, cause it is in my mind, I'm still questioning.
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Maybe, maybe this is really what happened, but I'm never going to know for sure because
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I can't go back and try my life a different way.
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But I did watch a whole, a seminar for medical school, um, by a neuro ophthalmologist.
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He was teaching the other, the students and he literally went through with them like pseudotumor
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I know it says in your textbook that, um, hormonal birth control causes pseudotumor cerebri.
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You need to understand that a lot of times it just happens to women, even though that's
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Listen to what I say, except if there's a venous sinus thrombosis involved, then it's definitely
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So that is a clot that you have, um, that they noticed on the MRI for me.
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And there was so much going on, um, in those three, the three times I was hospitalized,
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I couldn't even keep track of everything that was going wrong in my body at the time.
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But when he was going through that in the medical school, I'm like, I'm recognizing these
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And he was confirming, he's like, if you see this, then it was.
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The birth control medication that caused that pseudotumor cerebri.
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So I'm just very, I don't want to be like ridiculous in my analogies, but I'm very in
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And it's just always that lingering thing of like, this was found in these clinical trials.
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I've had another doctor say, your body went to trash after you took those birth control
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Like, how can I not sit here and say, that's what happened to me?
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And I want to zone in on something that you said that doesn't directly have to do with
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birth control, but it has to do with just the reproductive world in general.
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Um, so I was conceived in a Petri dish in 1994 in a IVF clinic in central Florida.
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I have siblings who were intentionally killed in that process.
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And I refer to myself as a survivor because 80% of the embryos that are created in an IVF
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laboratory do not get to leave the IVF laboratory.
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They're intentionally killed by being sprayed with toxic solution when they're no longer wanted.
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So I feel very chosen to have been allowed to live at all.
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And, um, it's a very, IVF is a very brutal, brutal, horrible process.
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I don't even know how many siblings I have that were killed in an IVF laboratory and I
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I have two other siblings who survived to birth from the IVF process.
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Um, they're two years younger than me, a brother and a sister, but those are not the only siblings
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And I feel like I have to address my relationship with IVF as a survivor because I cannot pretend
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When did you start looking into the IVF process?
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Because as you know, your and my position on IVF is, um, in general, like a unique one.
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Even a lot of Christians that listen to this podcast, they do not like when I talk negatively
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So at some point you must have really researched the process and the risks.
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So I am, I am so grateful for my parents' honesty about IVF and as I got older about
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their IVF experience, because it really gave me permission as a young child, we're talking
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like 12 years old to get online and start researching, um, healthy sexual reproduction.
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Like I found that interesting, like eggs, sperm fusion.
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And so at a very young age, I was researching it on a level that most children don't or are
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And so of course, as I start looking into what is the IVF process, like how do you, um, how
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I saw very quickly the abuse and the brutality of what is happening in that industry.
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I think it's very, um, branded as we just want to help infertile couples have babies.
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I think that's a beautiful thing to want to help an infertile couple have a baby.
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I think that infertility is one of the most tragic, horrible things that happens in our
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But as soon as you pull back the veil on the science of like, okay, well, what's actually
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Cause you can't just like roll some dice and shake your magic eight ball around.
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Those are, um, complicated, challenging, um, concerning processes in themselves.
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And then you have a baby in a dish that needs its mother, that needs to be attached to the
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But for most babies, like I said, they don't do that with them.
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They try to decide, oh, is this baby good enough?
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Because it's not about one baby at a time and making sure that they're safe, protected
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It's about how many babies can we do as quickly as possible to save as much money as possible
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to inflate, to honestly, like disingenuously inflate the success race of success rate of
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So couples will feel very comfortable with what we're doing, even though what we're doing
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is killing or permanently freezing 80% of these babies.
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How can we pretend that they're not babies, even though it is a human life unique with
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And I just was always raised with this very kind of black and white perception of morality.
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And sometimes that can be hard because it can make empathy difficult for you in some
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But sometimes it can be so freeing because you can just look at something and say, I
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You don't get to kill it just because it's in a dish.
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That makes me a very controversial person sometimes because I think a lot of people expect me to
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just hug IVF with open arms and say, oh, it's wonderful.
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No, I'm going to call out the abuse when I see it, especially because it happened to my
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own family members and especially because it's continuing to happen.
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And every time that Christians or pro-lifers try to justify the brutality in in vitro fertilization,
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they are minimizing the humanity of human beings.
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And I take that very offensively, just on a personal level, because I was in a death.
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And I deserve just as much respect then as I do now.
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And when they deny the humanity of those babies in a dish, it hurts me.
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It makes me feel very angry because then they're denying my humanity as well.
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It is not easy for me to talk about this publicly on my parents.
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I have a lot of sympathy for women who went through IVF in the 90s.
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Because they didn't have an iPhone in their pocket to fact check the things that their
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They didn't have really anywhere else to go for their information.
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So when your doctor tells you, oh, I know you have more babies in the freezer, but I
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don't know that you should really be having any more babies yourself.
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And it's like it's not really like a baby anyway.
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Like it's just it's just a potential for a baby.
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I have an amazing privilege growing up after 1995, being able to even look up IVF and see
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So there is a lot of regret from my parents for the embryos that they just they agreed
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But I think my mom sums it up the best when she said she didn't know she was killing her
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And that's just doctors are supposed to be there to support you, tell you the truth,
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They're not supposed to be there to lie to you about your babies.
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Tell me about how your faith has developed through both of these things that we've talked about
00:26:51.720
so far, and we still have more to your story that we're going to get into, but discovering
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what happened to your siblings, but then also going through the tragedy of birth control,
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I know that you were raised a Christian, but this is a lot for a young person to wrestle with.
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After the blindness, I really started to believe in this subtle, very dangerous lie that, okay,
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God loves me and God, you know, he wants me to serve him, but God doesn't find me special
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The doctors told me I was going to get my, told me I was going to get my vision back and
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And it just seemed like turn after turn, things were going not the way they were supposed to.
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And I kept crying out to God, like, why would you let me go blind at 19 years old?
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And so I just started to believe in almost this kind of deism about God where it's like,
00:28:07.460
I know he's like, think, has an order to this world that he has planned, but, you know,
00:28:16.460
And I really stayed in that place for years until, um, I got pregnant with my son.
00:28:26.780
And we really got put on a path to, for me to stand up on all of the pro-life issues,
00:28:36.240
all the pro-life ethics that the IVF and birth control situation had really opened my eyes
00:28:41.620
to, and then I realized, wow, everything that God has put in my life, even the fact that
00:28:48.900
I was manufactured in a laboratory, even the fact that I was what felt cruelly blinded at
00:28:57.240
19 years old, he has been paving my path so I could be ready to give the fight of my life
00:29:11.120
You said that this is your second child and you had to fight to save him.
00:29:17.240
When I was 12 weeks pregnant with my son, he had an abnormal ultrasound and I'm not talking
00:29:23.600
like, oh, there was like a little glitch in the ultrasound machine or something that they
00:29:30.300
Um, the ultrasound image was so bad that the ultrasound tech had to leave the room,
00:29:38.020
show it to the maternal fetal medicine specialist, which is a extremely high risk OBGYN who was
00:29:46.460
on call at the hospital that day, go back in to take more pictures and then send him into my room
00:29:53.180
for an impromptu meeting to talk about abortion.
00:29:56.240
There was a mass in my son's abdomen that was a third of his body.
00:30:03.880
They told me it could be bowel entanglement, best case scenario, more likely down syndrome,
00:30:10.480
more likely something that we would never identify because I'd miscarry him so quickly.
00:30:15.580
We were terrified, me and my husband, we didn't know what to do.
00:30:26.980
They said, well, that depends on whether you're going to continue with the pregnancy or terminate.
00:30:32.060
I was just shocked because I thought that when you're pregnant and you go to the doctor
00:30:37.580
to help you keep your baby healthy, they would understand that the last thing I would want
00:30:44.040
But they seemed to think that would be the first thing I wanted to do.
00:30:49.140
They were telling me about likely disability, permanent for the rest of his life.
00:30:53.540
They were telling me about significant cognitive delays and just really pushing me on trying
00:31:01.320
to make an abortion decision quickly before I approached the state's legal cutoff in a way
00:31:08.320
that they were just implying that my son is going to be so messed up.
00:31:18.140
And that's hard enough to hear as a mama who loves her baby, who wanted her baby, whose
00:31:28.060
But it hurts so much more being a disabled woman.
00:31:31.780
And the lack of awareness on my doctor say essentially to me, there's no way you could love
00:31:40.300
So I just couldn't even believe that he could say those words to me, knowing that I'm sitting
00:31:49.120
And I realized that everything God had taught me opened my eyes to through IVF and birth control,
00:31:56.780
even allowing me to stay blind when all the doctors said that I wouldn't.
00:32:01.000
He moved all of that textbook knowledge, all of that head knowledge to a heart knowledge,
00:32:20.040
Even if he was going to be stillborn, like they told me was very possible, even if he
00:32:26.160
was going to be cognitively delayed, even if he was going to have bags and tubes and
00:32:29.740
wires and scanners and all these things that a normal, able-bodied mom doesn't feel like
00:32:35.680
she could handle, now I had to handle with blindness.
00:32:43.580
And it was a long, long time until they had a diagnosis for me.
00:32:52.720
And the shocking part is that as soon as I hit that state legal cutoff, they simply knew
00:33:04.660
It was actually, Dobbs was actually being brought to the courts at the same time I was going
00:33:16.020
I was being harassed about having an abortion that I didn't want.
00:33:19.460
My doctor even called me at home to talk to me about abortion.
00:33:24.100
But then as soon as the hospital couldn't make money off selling me an abortion anymore,
00:33:33.400
And they had a diagnosis for me that was non-serious liver calcifications.
00:33:39.400
And my son is completely, perfectly healthy and fine.
00:33:42.440
So when it was no longer legal for you to have an abortion anymore, they told you that
00:33:47.860
the diagnosis was actually fine and something that could resolve itself.
00:33:54.440
By his first birthday, his liver calcifications were completely gone.
00:34:03.260
And they completely dissolved, which in that first appointment, we asked the doctor,
00:34:08.260
is there any way your ultrasound machine is wrong?
00:34:11.620
I said, is there any way this abnormality can go away on its own?
00:34:18.740
And I was able to push back on him to shut out all that just evil, honestly evil, for
00:34:26.760
a doctor to come in a room and tell a disabled woman that she doesn't want her disabled baby
00:34:31.040
It was because of everything God had put me through, through knowing I grew up IVF, through being blind
00:34:39.420
All of this preparation he had given me, I realized in that one moment, that was all to save my son.
00:34:49.680
I didn't know what was going to happen to my baby.
00:34:55.740
And now I realize that that pain was so much worse, so much worse than my blindness.
00:35:03.180
Even though my blindness is forever, if I had to go blind to know how to save my son's life,
00:35:13.280
And think about how many moms would listen to their doctor because they felt like, well,
00:35:28.080
If I do it in the first trimester, it doesn't matter.
00:35:33.020
And it kind of makes me wonder because a lot of the stories that we hear post-dobs are,
00:35:37.540
you know, I had to abort my child because of this diagnosis.
00:35:42.360
I wonder how many of those women, and maybe we all would in this position,
00:35:46.660
are almost convincing themselves and even like exaggerating what the doctor told them
00:35:53.540
and believing the worst case scenario of what the doctor said was possible
00:35:59.560
in order to make themselves feel better about the decision that they made.
00:36:04.480
When in reality, in many instances, it was maybe like yours where it was a possibility
00:36:09.440
that it was serious, but it ended up being something that could have been resolved.
00:36:13.600
And I'm just sad thinking about how many toddlers and teenagers and adults we could have in this
00:36:19.920
country had more women pushed back against their doctors and said, no, I'm going to save.
00:36:27.080
Yeah. And even a lot of these women don't understand the science behind pregnancy.
00:36:35.780
They don't understand the science behind fetal development.
00:36:38.540
And so that's why I feel like God gave me such a gift,
00:36:41.500
such a gift by having the weirdest hobby in school at 12 years old that I would go up,
00:36:46.700
I would get off the bus and I would go upstairs.
00:36:48.820
And instead of like playing video games or something with my brother and sister,
00:36:51.860
I would get on pro-life websites and read all about the baby and everything that was going
00:36:56.800
on. That's such a gift from God. Because even I felt the pressure from the doctor when they were
00:37:02.920
talking about my son. Even I was wondering, can I do this? Even I was asking this silly question,
00:37:07.540
like, is this going to put my health in danger if he's handicapped? And I really had to just sit in
00:37:13.800
my room by myself and calm down and say, what do I know? What have I learned? And as soon as I
00:37:18.600
started doing that, I realized that everything they told me, everything they were telling me was a
00:37:21.980
lie. Everything was manipulation. Everything was pressure. And I realized that because I was on
00:37:29.660
Medicaid at the time with that pregnancy, they probably would make more money if I chose abortion
00:37:34.640
than if I went through a very difficult, labor intensive, expensive birth for the hospital. And it just
00:37:42.660
really like showed me exactly what was going on. And it gave me the strength to make my decision.
00:37:51.980
And I found some support from my local pregnancy resource center of how I needed to navigate those
00:37:57.900
complaints with the doctor. Because I had already told the hospital, hey, I told him no abortion and
00:38:02.080
he won't stop talking to me about it. Didn't matter. He came in and did it again. And I just didn't know
00:38:07.780
how to break through with them. So getting the support from the local PRC of like, okay, Chelsea,
00:38:12.160
you need to say it like this. Because these are all, this is a pro-abortion space that you're going
00:38:17.540
into. And you can't just come in and say, I'm pro-life and cry and then take you seriously.
00:38:22.500
You need to know how to navigate. Like, don't say, I'm filing complaints. Say, I'm asking for a second
00:38:27.280
opinion. Like little tricks like that to get the medical staff to take you more seriously. So you're not
00:38:32.400
just labeled the hysterical woman in exam room 12. Yeah. Wow. It was so helpful. And it's exactly
00:38:38.380
what I needed. I knew what I had to do, but I needed my community and other pro-life resources
00:38:44.340
to just give me the strength to do it. And now you have how many children? I have two who run around.
00:38:52.160
I am also 29 weeks pregnant. Oh, congratulations. So we, I've got a busy, I've got a busy, messy,
00:39:00.720
very crazy house right now. But it's just, I just sometimes like really on my son's first birthday,
00:39:08.780
we were saying him happy birthday and I just sobbed. Yeah. I just couldn't stop crying because
00:39:13.440
I was told that that was not going to happen. Yeah. And it just, it breaks my heart knowing that
00:39:21.000
one day I'm going to have to tell him what happened and that the doctor who was supposed to fight to save
00:39:25.860
him thought it would be totally fine if he died. Yeah. And I just, I know that that will probably
00:39:34.100
push my son in a good direction for how he views the world, for how he has compassion on other people,
00:39:43.080
on especially people with disabilities. But it's just, no mom should ever have to hear that about
00:39:48.680
their baby. No, absolutely not. And I just am thankful for your courage. And I know that your son,
00:39:55.600
even if he doesn't understand, is also thankful and will be thankful for that fight.
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00:41:06.260
Can you tell us a little bit more about what it's like being a blind mom? Like, I love the just the
00:41:17.620
sweetness and the sincerity and the fight and your story and going through all of these challenges,
00:41:22.100
but you also have an awesome sense of humor. And you kind of make light, you might have like make
00:41:27.180
light of a lot of the challenges that you have, which I mean, you kind of have to because we're still
00:41:32.820
called to like live a joyful life. So talk to us just about kind of like some of the practical
00:41:37.280
parts of being a blind mom. Yeah. Well, um, humor has always been my coping mechanism.
00:41:42.180
Yeah. That's definitely how we've gotten through a lot. Um, I remember like when I first went blind,
00:41:47.440
um, and it'd been a little bit of enough time for me to start making jokes. I told my dad, I was like,
00:41:52.180
Hey dad, you know how you spent all that money on IVF and like, you're supposed to get a healthy baby
00:41:56.220
from that. Maybe you could get a refund now. So yeah, my dad did not think it was funny.
00:42:01.580
Yeah. He probably didn't. I thought it was hilarious. And, um, that is definitely how I
00:42:07.360
get through a lot of these days because I deal with all of the same challenges that every mom
00:42:12.800
deals with. I just have to do it with a blindfold on. So for example, um, my most popular reel on
00:42:19.740
Instagram is me slipping in a puddle of pee from my son. Oh yes. I think that's the first one that I
00:42:26.260
saw from you too. Okay. Tell us that story. Tell us what happened about you slipping in pee.
00:42:30.760
So of course, when you're setting up camera for Instagram, like I'm a real mom with a real life.
00:42:35.760
Like I'm not running around filming myself all of the time. So me and my husband were thinking like,
00:42:40.980
what is like genuine to like what happens in my actual life? And during, um, while I was pregnant
00:42:46.580
with my son, that is when my daughter at like 20 months old decided she was going to potty train and
00:42:52.640
she would, her way of potty training was just stripping off all of her clothes and pooping
00:42:57.340
wherever she wanted in the house. Oh no. And because it's not good. My husband worked all the
00:43:01.280
time. Like I wouldn't know she'd pooped until I stepped in it. And then I'd have to be on my hands
00:43:05.960
and knees at 36 weeks pregnant, cleaning up poop, hoping I got it all. So I have to FaceTime my mom
00:43:12.880
and say like, do you see any more poop in this living room? And she's like, well, hold the camera
00:43:16.780
steady. I'm like, I'm on my hands and knees at 36 weeks pregnant. Like, I don't know what you want
00:43:20.560
for me right now. I'm just trying to clean up all of this poop before my company comes over.
00:43:26.400
And so we're like, how can we turn that into a reel? And, um, so we staged the reel and set it
00:43:33.240
up like just what would normally happen. My son rips off his diaper. He pees on the floor. He runs
00:43:37.280
away. I find it an hour later. But the trouble with the video is we went to pretend to fall down
00:43:43.060
in the pee. I actually fell down in the pee. I stepped on the diaper. I slipped. I I've hit the
00:43:49.940
ground so hard. I literally just called my husband. I'm like, I hope you got that take
00:43:54.260
because I don't want to do it again. Yeah. That was a real fall. Oh my goodness. But luckily my,
00:43:59.880
my booty absorbed the whole thing. The whole fall. How do you like, how do you cook and all of that?
00:44:07.400
Yeah. So believe it or not, some things as a blind person are a lot easier than you think they are.
00:44:13.320
Some things are like way harder. Cooking is one of the easiest things I do. Doing dishes,
00:44:17.440
unfortunately, is one of the easiest things that I do. So I can't get out of it. Yeah.
00:44:21.160
Um, transportation is the hardest thing that I have to figure out because I can't drive.
00:44:26.560
I have two kids with car seats. I'm about to have a third kid in a car seat. I have to phone a friend
00:44:32.860
because there's only so much you can take on the bus. There's only so much you feel safe taking on
00:44:38.880
the bus as a blind mom with now about to be three kids you're taking care of. So when my kid is homesick
00:44:46.040
and they need to go to the doctor, that's really hard for me to figure out because I have to call
00:44:51.720
someone to babysit the healthy kid. Then I have to call someone else who can fit me and the sick kid
00:45:00.500
and the car seat in their car to take us all the way across town to go to the doctor. Like it's a lot.
00:45:06.780
There's so much that surprises you about being a disabled parent. You're like, this is really hard.
00:45:13.380
But there's also a lot of community if you reach out and just ask for help. Like my church has
00:45:20.120
stepped up so much to be there for me. I have a friend who takes me and my son to mom's group
00:45:27.400
in the mornings while my daughter is at school. Just these amazing blessings that show up also with
00:45:34.200
the disability. Because I think that so many times people look at an issue like with their pregnant
00:45:39.440
in a crisis or if they're disabled or if they're having financial burdens, they're just like, oh,
00:45:43.820
I have to do this by myself. And I can never, I could never get that done. But like what God says
00:45:49.040
in 2 Corinthians 12 verse 9, he says, my power is made perfect in weakness. Like the point of our
00:45:54.200
lives is not to be Superman. The point of our lives is to be weak and to be fulfilled by him
00:46:00.740
and the blessings and the mercies that he gives us. So there are so many times where I'm like,
00:46:06.460
oh, I could never, I'm never going to be able to handle this. Like what am I doing? Like,
00:46:10.080
like who am I right now? Like I'm a full-time stay-at-home mom and yet somehow I've become
00:46:14.460
a pro-life speaker and influencer. I'm like flying across the country telling my stories.
00:46:19.120
I'm just, that should not be possible with a four-year-old, a two-year-old and a 29-week-old
00:46:23.960
in my belly slowing me down and making me nauseous. But God has just shown up in so many ways.
00:46:29.380
And that's why I really try to communicate to people on my platform. I'll get like devastating
00:46:34.260
messages from people saying, well, I'm disabled. And if I ever got pregnant, I would have to have
00:46:39.180
an abortion because I could just never do it. And that's so not true. That's not true. And it's
00:46:44.300
heartbreaking because not only is that very possible, like there's no reason a disabled woman can't get
00:46:49.800
pregnant. We have lives too. We have husbands. We have, we have dreams for ourselves. What's devastating
00:46:56.800
beyond the fact that she would consent to an abortion is that she doesn't believe in herself.
00:47:02.300
She thinks that she is that inferior that she cannot endure. She cannot thrive in throughout
00:47:11.940
these weaknesses. And like I said, accept the blessings of God and really make it through.
00:47:17.780
And so, so I really try to push out to people like life is hard no matter who you are. You don't have
00:47:22.160
to be blind for your life to be hard, but you can be sustained. You can keep going. Our lives are not
00:47:28.640
about ourselves anyway. They're not about, about how happy we were on Tuesday, about how easy it was
00:47:34.480
to get the dishes done. Our lives are for other people. Our lives are for God. And we just have to
00:47:39.260
not quit. We have to keep going because there are amazing blessings that show up unexpectedly. Like
00:47:45.200
my son, I love my daughter and I love my little girl who's coming, but my son's life is,
00:47:51.960
there's just something about it because of what happened. And this blessing that we have now,
00:47:56.000
because we, me and my husband, we chose like, no, we don't kill babies. That's just the mantra.
00:48:02.700
We don't kill babies. And we trusted God. I said, I don't know how I'm going to,
00:48:07.600
I don't know how I'm going to take care of tubes, wires, bags on, on this little boy,
00:48:11.580
but I'm going to do it because God gave me this baby. I'm going to fight for him.
00:48:14.620
Yeah. Wow. I love seeing God's just hand of redemption and your story and what Satan meant
00:48:21.520
for evil and could have used for evil. As you described all of those moments of being ignored,
00:48:28.900
of being persuaded in a way that, I mean, it really silenced you and really hurt you physically and
00:48:37.080
emotionally, um, how God used that for not only your good in his glory, but also to save the life
00:48:43.980
of your child and how he's continuing to use that, as you said, to give glory to himself. And
00:48:49.240
that's one theme we see throughout scripture that God will stop at nothing to give himself glory,
00:48:55.280
even if that means things happening to us or in our lives that we do not understand.
00:49:01.320
And you are just a really beautiful example of that. So thank you. Thank you for your courage.
00:49:06.840
And thank you so much for taking the time to come here and share your story. It's going to help a lot of people.