A woman from North Carolina who was raped on a business trip a year ago is sharing her story of how she and her husband refused abortion when she found herself pregnant after the assault.

Jennifer Christie says the incident happened in January 2014 as she stayed at a hotel in a college town. She remembers opening her hotel room door and then when she turned to close it, a large man stood before her and struck her in the face. Christie was found lying in the staircase and tested negative for a number of sexually transmitted diseases.

One month later, while working aboard a cruise ship, Christie had an ultrasound done after she fell ill with dysentery. It was then that she discovered that she was pregnant.

“I spent the next week listening to a team of very well meaning doctors and nurses console me with how ‘easy’ it would be to ‘take care of it’—to kill the child,” she recalled.

But Christie said that she could do no such thing, and neither could her husband.

“When I told him I was pregnant, he said with his voice calm and steady, ‘Okay. Okay … All right …. This is all right,” she remembered. “I asked him, ‘What do you mean this is all right?'”

“I mean we can do this,” he replied. “We’ll get through this. It’ll be okay.”

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And as Christie began to feel the baby moving and growing inside of her, she knew her husband was right. She said that she told those urging her to abort that if they ever wonder what became of her, they can know that she gave birth to the child. Christie remembered that even the doctor who most advised her to abort had tears in her eyes in response to her words.

“For the first time, I thought of how God can use this, this nightmare I’d endured—use me,” she explained.

Although the pregnancy was a difficult one, Christie gave birth to a healthy baby boy—and doesn’t regret giving him life.

“Our little boy may have been conceived in violence, but he is a gift from God—a delicious gift that filled the hole in our family that we never realized was there,” she said. “He made us complete.”

But Christie is concerned about the culture of death that she observed around her through the ordeal as many believe that unborn children should die for the crimes of his or her father.

“The pressure to abort from the medical community was extremely eye opening to me,” she states. “So many times I was told how ‘simple’ it would be and how quickly I could just ‘get on with my life’ once it was over. It was heartbreaking to have to repeatedly hear it. Even some friends thought keeping the baby was a mistake—that I wouldn’t be able to handle things emotionally.”

Christie now surrounds herself with other women who have also given birth following rape.