Even Rape Is Not Reason Enough to Murder an Unborn Child

After a 1929 rape, a reunion of mom and daughter
By TOM BERG / THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER


SAN CLEMENTE – For 77 years she kept it hidden inside.

Her secret.


Each May 22, Minka Disbrow silently wished a happy birthday to the baby girl she gave away in 1929. How is she, Disbrow wondered. Where is she? Who is she?


But there was no way of knowing. Not after what happened so long ago.

Back then, no one talked about sex. Or pregnancy. Or 16-year-old girls who were raped among the small dairy farms of South Dakota. So Disbrow bottled up her secret deep inside.

And kept it there.

Months turned into years. Years into decades. Until Disbrow woke up May 22, 2006, and after wishing happy birthday to her little girl, she prayed: Lord, if you would just let me see Betty Jane, I won't bother her, I promise. I just want to see her before I die.

Some might consider it a fool's prayer. Disbrow was 94. And her baby girl, if still alive, would be 77.

To meet would take a miracle.



SCATTERWOOD LAKE

She hauled water from a well. Used an outhouse for a toilet. Rode a horse-drawn sled to church in winter.

"At age 6, we had to pick mustard and potatoes in the field," says Disbrow, who also fed pigs and milked cows before walking to school. Chores increased after eighth grade.

High school is for city kids with nothing to do, said her stepdad, who kept Disbrow home to work.

You can imagine her delight to be invited to a picnic the summer of her 16th year. It was held at Scatterwood Lake with girls from a local sewing class.

Let's go for a walk, said her friend Elizabeth.

They meandered along the South Dakota lake – unaware of three men watching. Approaching.

The attack came fast. Its violence was foreign to a girl who still believed storks delivered babies.

"We couldn't go back and say we were raped," Disbrow says. "We were paralyzed. We never said anything."

She had no one to tell. No one to comfort her. No one to explain what happened. Nothing but cows that needed milking and milk that needed bottling and bottles that needed washing.

Nothing but chores.

"You just kept it all in your heart," she says.

Until her belly started to grow.



BETTY JANE

She was sent to the Lutheran Home for Girls in Sioux Falls, S.D.

"My mother and stepfather made up their minds, I was not to come home with a baby," says Disbrow.

It was there, someone finally explained what had happened and what would happen.

Betty Jane was born May 22, 1929, with a dimple on her chin and a good home waiting for her in Iowa.

"She was my darling," says Disbrow, who spent a month with her baby before being sent home.

Back on the farm, she milked cows each morning, worked in a slaughterhouse all day and faced more chores at night. Then, in the quiet of her room, she would write letters to the Lutheran home asking about her baby.

How is my Betty Jane? she wrote in one letter. Any word from her adoptive parents? I hope she's being a good girl.

Our holiday would be complete, she wrote in another, if we were to just get word about Betty Jane.

But of course, she couldn't.

And so the months turned into years. The years into decades. Until Disbrow woke up May 22, 2006, and prayed to see the little girl she gave away in 1929.

A fool's prayer?

Within days, a South Dakota court granted permission to a 77-year-old woman in Viroqua, Wis., to see some records she sought about her adoption.

It was at the Lutheran Home for Girls in Sioux Falls, S.D.

In 1929.



RUTH

Disbrow's phone rang six weeks after her prayer.

Do you know anything about Betty Jane? a man asked. Or Sioux Falls?

"Yes," said Disbrow. "But who are you?"

I'm the son of your daughter, he said. Would you like to talk to your daughter? To Betty Jane?

"My knees buckled," recalls Disbrow.

She learned that her baby girl, now named Ruth Lee, was married and had six children – including astronaut Mark Lee who'd flown into space four times.

She also learned how her prayer was answered: Ruth recently had undergone heart surgery and thought it wise to find her birth mother's health records. Her search uncovered Disbrow's letters and, eventually, the fact that Disbrow was still alive.

"I got goose bumps all over my body," Ruth recalls. "I just didn't expect that."

Finally, after 77 years apart, mother and daughter would meet. And Disbrow's secret would come out.

"Oh my goodness," she fretted. "What are people going to think? My own family doesn't know."

Right away, she called a daughter in Portland, Ore., to explain. Her secret gushed out – as it did, a joy overtook the pain.

"I never heard her so excited," says Dianna Huhn, 65, of Portland, one of two children Disbrow had from her marriage to Eugene Disbrow. "And from that day on, I have never seen my mom so happy."

Disbrow's family, friends and church all embraced her story. Grown men cried when she described it at Heritage Christian Fellowship in San Clemente.

And when mother and daughter met?

"It was like we'd known each other all our lives," says Ruth Lee, now 82.

"It was like we never parted," says Disbrow, who recently told this story to friends at her 100th birthday party.

Immediately after, Disbrow prayed again. She thanked God. She forgave the man who raped her. And she wondered something about him for the first time:

"I wondered if he ever watched the space shuttle take off, not knowing that perhaps one of those he was watching was his grandson."

Contact the writer: 714-796-6979 or tberg@ocregister.com

Mark 16:15-20

15 He said to them, “Go into all the world and preach the gospel to all creation. 16 Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved, but whoever does not believe will be condemned. 17 And these signs will accompany those who believe: In my name they will drive out demons; they will speak in new tongues; 18 they will pick up snakes with their hands; and when they drink deadly poison, it will not hurt them at all; they will place their hands on sick people, and they will get well.”

19 After the Lord Jesus had spoken to them, he was taken up into heaven and he sat at the right hand of God. 20 Then the disciples went out and preached everywhere, and the Lord worked with them and confirmed his word by the signs that accompanied it.