Home ¢ Sheri Goh is the Editor of Methodist Message. / Photos courtesy of Safe Place and Armour Publishing
Safe Place, currently housed in an SLA building leased from the government
From shame to sanctuary
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f it were up to Jennifer Heng, 44, no woman in Singapore would need an abortion. That is why she set up Safe Place, a shelter for expectant mothers in distress. Safe Place is housed in a Singapore Land Authority black-andwhite bungalow. In 2017, there were 7,217 abortions recorded in Singapore. This is a staggeringly high number, considering Singapore’s low fertility rate, and that there were 39,615 live births that year. (That number, however, is still much lower than in 1985, during which almost 24,000 abortions were performed.) Every year, many women resort to abortions because of lack of choice, such as transient living arrangements, or crowded homes that cannot accommodate a new baby. They may come from broken families, or are escaping abusive situations, or became pregnant out of wedlock or because of rape, or may have been kicked out by their families. Some may received a poor prognosis of pregnancy, or are estranged from their husbands. Each of these pregnant women has a unique and complicated situation that drives her to seek abortion. Jennifer, her team of six staff and about a hundred volunteers work with family service centres, hospitals and VWOs to find solutions for these mothers so that they can keep their babies, and acquire skills to enable them to make a life together with their child.
I want; I can; I hope As Jennifer explains, Safe Place wants to enable expectant mothers in distress to be able to say: “I want”—that they resolve to take ownership of their lives and their decisions. This is difficult because many of them come from unhealthy relationships and broken families, and their reflex action is to take flight.
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“I can”—to learn practical skills such as caring for their babies, and also softer skills such as communication, understanding their strengths, getting and keeping a job, and maintaining relationships with partners and family members. And “I hope”—that they will develop, over time, a positive perspective of their future, not just for themselves, but also for their families. “It is possible for [a distressed pregnant woman] not to remain in this situation repeatedly, in a vicious circle,” Jennifer explains.
Walking out of secret shame Jennifer herself has been through some rocky times. In her book, Walking Out of Secret Shame, she recounts her father’s struggles with bankruptcy and suicidal tendencies, and her family’s breakup when her parents divorced. She went looking for love in romantic relationships in her teens, and ended up pregnant at 17. Even though she was in a good junior college and was attending a church, she did not talk to anyone in her church or family because not only was she too proud and too ashamed to seek help, she also thought they would not understand. At 22 weeks pregnant, alone and wracked with guilt, she secretly underwent a painful abortion. She and her then-boyfriend never discussed the abortion; they broke up soon after and she started serial dating. When she was 19 and a polytechnic student, Jennifer started a relationship that turned abusive. She got pregnant again and had a second abortion. “The effect [of the trauma of abortion] on your entire being is much deeper and much more destructive than you can imagine,” she recounts in her book. “[It] never allows you to go back to normalcy.” The secret shame, guilt and emotional trauma of her abortions and tumultuous relationships did not leave her, even after she went overseas for her tertiary education.
Freedom in forgiveness For years after that, troubled by her heavy emotional and spiritual burden, she wondered what it meant to be forgiven and to walk with God with a past like that. Surely there were others who had been through the same experience, and were suffering as well— what hope did they have? In 2001, she attended Discipleship Training School (DTS), run by Youth with a Mission (YWAM). She came to the divine realisation that the only way to be freed from her past would be to be forgiven by God for the abortions, to forgive herself, and to forgive those who had wronged her, such as her exboyfriends and her father. Later that year, she started working as a pastoral staff at Church of Our Saviour. Around Christmas in 2001, God unexpectedly planted in her mind the thought to start a home for unwed mothers.
A surprising call to serve Taken aback, Jennifer was greatly unwilling. She tried to push the thought away, but it only got stronger. Two weeks later, a strange thing happened. At church, she met someone whom she had never met before—and whom she was subsequently never able to track down—a man named Adi. Shortly after, Adi sent her an email titled “Stop abortion: a prayer from heaven”. It was a poem written, from the perspective of an aborted baby, to her mother, which directly echoed God’s call to start a home. As Jennifer talked more to a counsellor and several trusted friends, she felt that spiritual call more urgently. In 2010, a divine appointment led her to the offices of Armour Publishing. She was by then married with a daughter. When her book was published In 2012, it raised public awareness not just to her personal experiences, but also to the
