A man and a woman, and what might not have been

For the last month – and leading up to the start of the regular session of the Louisiana Legislature on April 10 – a large RV has been rolling throughout the state with a simple message: “Keep Louisiana pro-life.”

There is no doubt Louisiana has done just that.

With the U.S. Supreme Court’s repeal of Roe v. Wade last June and Louisiana’s trigger law making abortion illegal – except to save the life of the mother – Louisiana Right to Life describes its home state as the “No. 2” pro-life state in the country.

At his end-of-year press conference in December, Gov. John Bel Edwards announced that he intends to ask legislators to modify Louisiana’s abortion ban by adding exceptions for rape and incest.

It’s a tough thing to talk about, but that’s exactly what Amber Sims Dubois, 32, and Dustin Bertrand, 33, both of Abbeville, Louisiana, have chosen to do.

Both were conceived in rape, and their mothers chose heroically to give birth to them despite the violence they had endured.

Dubois’ parents divorced when she was 6, and through a series of events, Dubois and her three younger sisters were raised by her paternal grandparents, stalwart members of First Baptist Church in Milton, Louisiana.

Dubois’ father moved to Texas and remarried, and her mother moved to Alabama but still remained in touch with her eldest daughter as she was growing up. She did not remarry.

“It was a little bit more flexible for her to visit more, which means I was more comfortable asking her these big-picture questions about our past,” Dubois said. “I was a freshman at Erath High School, so I made this argument that I was a big girl and I deserved the truth.”

Dubois’ primary intention was to find out what had precipitated her parents’ divorce. Her mother checked her out of school one day and drove her to Magdalen Square in nearby Abbeville, where they just sat and talked about the missing jigsaw pieces.

“It turns out they were just really young and both were really hurt people, and when we’re not always healthy and when we deal with our pain it ends up compounding, so they ended up divorcing,” Dubois said.

The weighty conversation left them thirsty. Dubois and her mother walked over to Black’s Cafe.

“I have something else I need you to know – so hold on to your chair,” Dubois’ mother told her. “Your father wasn’t your father.”

Before she had met her future husband, Dubois’ mother had gone out and had been raped by an acquaintance.

“She was encouraged to ‘take care of it,’” Dubois said. “My mom actually was and still is an atheist to this day, but she knew that life was sacred, and she chose the sacred. I asked her a lot of these mythical questions about children conceived in rape – about if it was hard to see me grow up because I look like him. She said, ‘It was, but not because of what you think it is. It’s because I knew I’d have to tell you the truth one day, and it would hurt you.’

“I asked her why she didn’t go through with getting an abortion, and she felt the pain of the abortion would be greater than the pain of the rape itself. She told me that I was the best decision she ever made.”

Bertrand was a sophomore at McNeese State University in Lake Charles in 2009 and preparing for surgery to repair three congenital holes in his heart. He had known that his stepfather was not his biological father but not much else.

“It was the seriousness of the surgery and the possibility of me not surviving,” Bertrand said. “It really provoked me wanting to know the story of where I came from. I’ll never forget the conversation: Abbeville, Louisiana, on a green picnic table on some gravel rocks next to a gray Lincoln owned by my grandma.”

Bertrand has launched a Catholic evangelist’s ministry called God-Made, Self-Driven, speaking mainly to youth groups around the country about the sacredness of life.

“I think the simple answer is that I’m living and I'm breathing, and I’ve actually had a life,” Bertrand said. “I can make my words sound fancy, but I think it comes down to the fact that I’ve been able to live a beautiful life that consisted in joys and sorrows, just like any other planned child, and if I’ve been able to do that, why should we rob another baby’s opportunity to do that?

“Maybe in somebody’s eyes abortion is a good option, but it’s not the best option,” Bertrand added. “The best option is protecting the baby and supporting the mom.”

Dubois, who became Catholic a few years after beginning her quest for answers to the big questions in her life, got married last month.

Her future husband Andrew, with no clue of the significance of the coming news that would shake the world, proposed to her on June 23, 2022.

That was the night before Roe v. Wade was overturned.

“So, I'm hoping to have children,” Amber Dubois said. “It’s like the legacy of life will go on. The legacy of life will continue.”

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