This story comes from the evangelical TV show The 700 Club, so use your own judgement in terms of the veracity of it.
On Thursday’s edition of The 700 Club, televangelist Pat Robertson featured a former atheist who said that she turned her life around after God canceled all of her appointments to get an abortion.
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Anny Donewald worked as stripper and prostitute for seven years, and reports feeling “dead on the inside, ” until her five separate abortion appointments were canceled.
So this is a Divine intervention story.
Donewald’s father was assistant coach to the Indiana University Hoosier basketball team under the legendary Bobby Knight and later head coach at Illinois State University. She was raped by one of her father’s team members at age 13.
“I ended up making the decision to keep my mouth shut, which ended up just really being a toxic decision, ” she told The 700 Club co-host Terry Meeuwsen.
Anny started using alcohol and sex, and won an amateur stripping contest at age 19. What followed were seven-years in the sex industry that “escalated into prostitution in Las Vegas and Beverly Hills.”
Just before her 26th birthday, she became pregnant.
“I was pregnant with my son, and went to have an abortion, because I’m dead on the inside, ” she said, adding that she didn’t “feel like I deserve” to be a parent.
“I was an atheist at the time, [but] I prayed. The running joke was that I was the praying atheist, ” Donewald said. “And I said, ‘God, I don’t know if you’re real or if you can hear me, but I don’t think you want me to do this. But I’m not going to be the one to stop it. You stop it.’”
“I made five different appointments, and they all got canceled, ” she reported.
One day her sister read her over the phone the verse: “The people which sat in darkness saw great light; and to them which sat in the region and shadow of death light is sprung up.”
The verse somehow turned her around. She has since started an outreach program to other women trapped in the sex industry.
“We demonize the people there, ” she said. “These girls are some of the most precious girls that have just taken a wrong turn, and all these need is another chance.”
“I always tell people there’s always things that happen that get girls into the sex industry, ” she said. “Nobody ever wants to wake up and say, ‘Hey, I think I’ll be a stripper.’”
