| | | This US Olympian saved her cousin's baby from abortion
By: Carly Hoilman | August 26, 2016
 Ryan Garza/The Flint Journal-MLive.com | AP Photo
Olympic women's boxing champion Claressa Shields is a fighter through and through. This year, the 21-year-old middleweight boxer from Flint, Mich., became the first U.S. boxer to win back-to-back golds.
Perhaps the most significant fight of her life, however, occurred in 2014, when 18-year-old Shields saved her cousin's baby girl from being aborted.
She revealed the story in an interview with ESPN when she was 19:
A lot of people don’t know, but I adopted a little girl. She’s about 6 months old now. Her name is Klaressa Shields like mine, just spelled with a K. My cousin had her. She already had two kids; she didn’t want to have another. I told her I wanted to have a baby after the Olympics but with my career and everything, I can’t afford to get pregnant right now. So she decided to keep the baby, and now the baby lives with me. I was there for her birth and got to cut her little cord. It was scary seeing her come out. I was like, “What is going on here?” We’re still going through the adoption process, but I have her when I’m at home. When I leave, my best friend’s mom and her birth mother have her.
A year later, Shields told Yahoo! Sports about how her cousin had wanted to abort her third baby, but didn’t have $500 to cover the procedure.
“I told her I didn’t believe in abortion and so I wasn’t giving her any money to do that,” Shields said. But her cousin persisted, and after raising $400 of the cost on her own, she returned to ask Shields to cover the $100 balance. Seeing that her cousin was determined, she presented the idea of adoption.
Shields, who had always wanted to be a mother, got her wish at a time when most of her peers were just graduating high school. And she didn't give up her dreams of being a world-renowned athlete to do it.
Shield altered her boxing schedule in order to care for her new child, who she named Klaressa. She'd often sacrifice gym time to train at home on days when a sitter wasn't available.
"I'd shadow box for an hour-and-a-half with the baby right there," she said.
Shields, who grew up in an impoverished, abusive home with a drug-addicted mother and a father who was in jail for the first seven years of her life, strived to give Klaressa something she never had.
"I'm going to give her the best of everything, and I'm going to protect her like no mother ever protected her baby," Shields told Yahoo!. "I just love having her, even though it's a huge responsibility. It makes me slow down and think, and that's a good thing."
But only eight months after Klaressa was born, things took a turn for the worse.
“It didn’t go through like it was supposed to,” Shields revealed in a 2015 interview with USA Today's Boxing Junkie. Klaressa's birth mother came back into the picture, demanding visitation rights and “a lot of other things.” The situation culminated in Shields' cousin accusing the world-class boxer of kidnapping her daughter.
“I could’ve went to jail when she called the cops on me. I had to explain to the cops that this child has been staying with me the last eight months,” Shields said. “Everything she has is here. Her milk, her car seat, all her clothes, everything is here.”
Eventually, however, Shields forgave her cousin and gave back the child whose life she'd saved just months before.
“It was very hurtful, but after all that I still forgave her and wanted to talk about the baby,” she said. “But she wanted all these exceptions put in the adoption contract. It was too much for me. I said, ‘I’m not going to let you control my life.’”
Claressa Shields became sick for weeks after letting Klaressa go, losing a significant amount of weight. But in the wake of the unforeseen tragedy, the young woman has kept her head up, striving to overcome whatever new challenges lie ahead.
“[N]ow I’m able to focus more on training,” she told Boxing Junkie last October. “I still think about the baby all the time but it was like, maybe it wasn’t time for me to have a child.”
Since that interview, Shields went on to make history at the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio. Following her Summer Games success, the boxer appeared on " Good Morning America" to share how she plans to use her story to inspire others who have come from similarly rough backgrounds and “tell them that they can make it.”
“With the platform that I have now, I'm just going to, you know, tell – tell people my story and tell them how, you know, my story involved God helping me get to where I got,” she said, “and how me being – being faithful to God helped me be where I am and train hard and put my body through all that hard work and still be able to smile about it afterward and not be bitter about it.”
- See more at: https://www.conservativereview.com/commentary/2016/08/olympian-adopts-cousins-baby#sthash.KURXjTo9.dpuf |
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