For the first 33 years of my life, I considered myself to be at least somewhat pro-choice, and the last 4 years I have fully embraced the pro-life movement. My journey was a gradual one, and it began back in 1993, when I paid a doctor to kill my baby. Had I not experienced such a personal and tragic consequence from my pro-choice stance, I might not be standing for life here before you today.
When I found myself pregnant, I was practicing natural family planning or NFP because I had trouble taking birth control pills. Unfortunately, using NFP is very difficult for single women, or women in tumultuous relationships because it requires open and cooperative communication between both partners. I'm not going to paint my ex-boyfriend as a bad man, but let's just say that he was just as confused as I was. He said that our failure to use NFP was all my fault because I had not communicated well enough and for the most part, that was true. I think that with most birth control options, it's the women who must apply the method and so they feel responsible and ashamed when it fails.
Shame is the number one reason that women choose abortion, they are ashamed of being pregnant on accident, too ashamed to ask for help, and ashamed of how others talk about them. They themselves may have talked poorly about unwed mothers, assuming they are irresponsible and calling them derogatory names. But even if it is irresponsible, that's no reason to disparage or condemn someone for we are all sinners, just in different ways. Because these women judge themselves harshly for failing they often long to “erase” the mistake of unplanned pregnancy hoping to turn off that little critical voice.
I did contemplate adoption, but I had such a strong sense of pride and righteousness, that I was afraid that another family would not raise my child as I saw fit, and that it would haunt me for the rest of my life. Many women who choose abortion over adoption report this feeling, a feeling of responsibility for the well-being of the child. Abortion was looking like my only option and based on the information I had, it seemed to me that it was in the child's best interest. Many pro-life and pro-choice activists alike assume that a woman has her own best interest in mind when she chooses abortion, but from the many women I have spoken to regarding their abortion experience, I think this is most often not the case. It's usually the child's well-being they are most concerned with.
What I never considered doing, was asking anyone, including my parents, for help. I already had experience with unplanned pregnancy, but not my own. I have 3 cousins who had unplanned pregnancies in their teens. I can't tell you exactly what was said about their situations because I don't recall, but I can tell you that it didn't paint a pretty picture of unplanned teenage pregnancy. My cousins kept their babies, and they still struggled with the consequences when I found myself pregnant. Also, one of my closest friends in high school found herself pregnant, despite using condoms. She hid her pregnancy, had the baby in her room at night, and her baby died of asphyxiation because there was mucous in his lungs when he was born. I told my Mom about what had happened and she became very upset, telling me that this was the reason that teenagers should not have sex.
Unfortunately, when I had this conversation with my mother, I was already having sex, and was already addicted to a casual-sex lifestyle. God Bless her because she didn't know, and that conversation, and others like it with my Dad, made me decide that I should hide any and all evidence of sexual activity from my parents, because I didn't want to disappoint them, or cause them stress and anguish. I even pretended that my boyfriend and I were just roommates like in three's company as we were also living with another girl at the time. I think it's pretty common for young people to live a double life like this. Especially if they come from a religious family. I cared about what my parents thought of me but only enough to keep secrets from them, not to change my behavior. If you are a parent, please keep this in mind, because a girl who feels able to tell her parents about her pregnancy is much less likely to abort. I lived a total lie and even told my parents that I was disgusted by sex in order to avoid talking about it and keep my sexual activity secret.
Now that I was unwed and pregnant at 19, living a double life and pretending to still be a virgin, I felt ashamed, and I was haunted by the idea that people in my family would talk about me the way I had heard my cousins being talked about. I wanted to feel better about having the abortion and so I began to drink heavily and smoke more. This helped me solidify the idea that it would be best to have the abortion because otherwise my baby might be born with fetal alcohol syndrome.
When I was in high school, abortion was taught as the right thing to do if you drink while pregnant, or if you have an abusive boyfriend, or if you are going to college and can't afford a baby yet. Abortion was taught to me as a solution that would erase the mistake of getting pregnant accidentally. I watched Oprah every day after school and there were many episodes about the wonderful option of abortion and how it had freed women to have careers and finish college and get out of bad relationships like the one I was in. Abortion seemed very neutral and even empowering.
I called around to several abortion clinics and the only hope I was given about my situation is that I found a clinic that only cost $270, an amount of money that my boyfriend and I could scrounge together. For some reason, the clinic only offered abortions after 12 weeks gestation, so I continued to smoke and drink while I waited. I didn't tell a soul what I was going through. I was enrolled in college courses and they began to suffer, so I dropped out. I thought I'd pick up again the next semester but it was years before I went back to college again.
When I went in for my appointment, there were no vigils, no protesters, just a stark building. I was never given any information about alternatives or support or adoption or anything. I saw the ultrasound but it was grainy, and I couldn't see any details. The size of “my pregnancy” which I did not even think of as a baby was larger than I expected it to be at 12 weeks, about the size of a small plum. You see, I had learned in school about gestation, but I didn't recall the timing of it. I honestly thought that my baby was merely tissue at this point, the 3-layered zygote that occurs just days after life begins was the picture I remembered from my high school science book. I couldn't tell by the ultrasound that my baby had a heartbeat, and arms and legs and organs. I asked the nurse if it was normal to be so large and she just said “that it's different for everyone”. They gave me some intravenous Valium, and they told me that they would give me a shot in my cervix in order to dilate it. In ignorance, I thought this meant that the shot would cause my cervix to dilate, kind of like when you get eye drops to dilate your eyes. I had no idea they were about to stab me repeatedly with sharp instruments in order to force my cervix open. The whole experience was very painful and traumatic, I remember how kind the nurse in attendance was, she held my hand and reassured me that it would be over soon.
I started to feel the effects of the Valium afterward, when I found myself in the recovery room with the other girls I saw in the waiting room before. I think it was more in effect afterward than it was during the procedure because the cheap clinics don't wait around for the Valium to start working, they have an assembly line to attend to. But through the blurry vision and the stumbling around I had an acute awareness of what had just happened.
Despite the awful thing that had happened, and despite what I had done, God gave me a gift that day. I'm not sure if all women who have abortions experience the same thing, but I'm so grateful to God that I did. I was given the grace of regret for what had happened. Where before I thought getting an abortion was no big deal, that I could use it to simply become un-pregnant. I was suddenly faced with the realization that something very terrible had happened, that a death had occurred, and that I had lost something so precious. I desperately searched my mind for a way to undo what had happened and wished that my baby could be put back where she belonged. I knew that my life would never be the same, and I didn't want it to be because I felt that I deserved to go through Hell. When God caused me to realize what I had done, He saved my soul, because after that moment I had no choice but to seek forgiveness. It took me many years of being lost in drugs and alcohol and promiscuity before I found forgiveness, and I won't go into that whole story here, but had it not been for my abortion experience, I might not be pro-life today. I may have never been inspired to help women find alternatives, I may never have been inspired to follow Jesus, because my pride had me believing that I didn't need the kind of redemption that He offers.
My conversion was gradual, at first I thought that abortion had been wrong for me, but that it might be right for others, but as years went by and I saw so many others go through the aftermath of abortion, my thoughts changed. Through prayer and understanding, I slowly began to accept that life was something to be fought for.
Finally, in 2007, I had a close friend decide to abort, and through that experience I faced the reality that I may have chosen abortion even if people had offered me help, even if there was a prayer vigil outside the clinic where I had my abortion, I would have gone inside. It was this realization that made me come full circle and decide that abortion must be made illegal. Making abortion illegal is the only thing that will make abortion rare simply because women facing unplanned pregnancies are desperate, and the pro-choice movement validates their choice to give up on themselves and their babies and do the much less empowering thing, the degrading thing, which is the murder of their own children.
I don't believe that women should be punished for desperately seeking a way out, but doctors and clinic workers, who are charged with their care, should know better. In our current political environment, they believe they are helping women, they believe that the sacrifice of the unborn is necessary to prevent the myth of overpopulation, and to prevent human suffering. We need the law to change, in order to influence them to help these women in a better way. And I think the most important thing that the pro-life movement can do, is convert doctors and clinic workers, acknowledge that they do indeed care about the women they believe they are helping. They even care about the babies they are killing, whom they erroneously believe are better off dead. We must approach them with love, and the most fervent prayers, to encourage them to leave the industry and become a strong voice in the pro-life movement. Some of them may fear that they would be unable to find work elsewhere, so we must offer them jobs if we can.
Making the change from pro-choice to pro-life is possible for everyone, so don't judge those on the other side. I often hear pro-life advocates talk of women who undergo abortion, or clinic workers and doctors in a derogatory fashion. This does not serve the pro-life movement. Sometimes these comments are quite innocent, and I see them everywhere. A friend of mine recently commented on her facebook page a simple statement “abortion is cruel”. Others chimed in about how disgusting it is that people have sex out of wedlock and then shirk responsibility by committing murder. It's important to understand that people who choose abortion do not have any malice towards their child. They simply don't understand the gravity of what they are doing. Many men and women who are responsible for abortion decisions feel they are doing what is in the child's best interest, they think of it as a mercy killing. We must approach them in their situations with love and understanding, not judgment and condemnation which will only push them away.
It's easy to lay blame when we get overwhelmed with sorrow about the situation, and how very many young women go in and out of the doors of a clinic, forever changed. In our minds we want to write them off as careless, unfeeling, cowards, to ease our own discomfort with what just happened to them. Try to recall that your own sister in Christ, standing before you today, was there many years ago. But she still remembers it like it was yesterday. These women, and the men escorting them, are the same way. They have hardened themselves to avoid the gravity of their actions. But through prayer, love and understanding, we can break their walls down.
And where do we approach these lost souls, contemplating abortion? Everywhere! It's not just at the abortion clinic where we may find ourselves in conversation with someone facing an unplanned pregnancy. They are only in the abortion clinic for a short time, other times they are everywhere else. Working alongside you or serving you food in a restaurant. It could be one of your teenage child's friends, someone sitting next to you in Church, or even someone in your own family who has a secret.
So how do we reach these people with the message of life? How can we give them hope? It's quite simple really, tell everyone, everywhere how you long to help men and women choose life instead of abortion, tell them how you are involved, and how you are inspired by organizations like Birthright or the Hope Center and 40 days for life. Tell them how you don't judge people for being in a bad situation. Young people, or even older people who are facing a frightening decision, and experiencing an unplanned pregnancy will very likely not tell you about their situation so don't disparage anyone in front of anyone else. It's so important to treat everyone, men and women, everywhere you go, as if they might be in this situation, or they may know someone who is facing an unplanned pregnancy.
Get online or buy some books and read about how best to talk about pro-life issues. Use non-combative language, and practice talking to people who don't agree with you in a positive manner. And most of all be generous and kind, always. If you have a waitress who gives you terrible service, give her a really good tip anyways, because you don't know why she's having a bad day. Spread your hope around. Don't give up on anyone, and let even the most staunchly pro-choice advocate know that you are pro-life because you deeply care about women and their babies. The worst thing they can do is disagree with you, but there's a chance you could plant a seed that saves someone they know from the tragedy of abortion and I'm sure you feel that the temporary discomfort of disagreement is worth saving a life. They may continue to disagree with you even as they refer a woman in crisis to you for help. I want to thank all of you from the bottom of my heart, for caring so much to be out there with your message of hope and love.
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