How One Conversation Turned Me Into a Pro-Life Advocate
In several previous articles for Live Action, I have alluded to the fact that I used to be pro-abortion, and fairly recently. The conversation that convinced me that abortion was wrong occurred in the fall of 2006
Before that day, I would have told anyone who asked that I was pro-choice. I was never involved in activism, unless you call giving the middle finger to pro-life protesters as I drove by abortion clinics “activism.” In fact, I never really gave abortion much thought. But in political debates — in which I frequently engaged — one of the accusations I liked to hurl at the opposition was that they were “anti-choice.”
…I had a friend. I’ll call her Sadie. She was a fellow rebel with me in high school and up through our early 20s. In the past couple years, we had fallen out of touch. She had converted and married a Catholic and had two babies. She’d become a sort of Betty Crocker, a model suburban housewife, albeit one who retained a marked tendency to listen to The Cure and smoke cloves.
Anyway, Sadie and I reconnected somehow, and she asked if I wanted to come spend the night. Her husband was overseas with the Army, so we could put the kids to bed and stay up all night talking like we did back in high school. I said sure, and she said she’d come by to pick me up.
I knew Sadie had become a Catholic Army wife, and I was prepared for the mini-van, the car seats, and the munchkins, but not for the pro-life bumper stickers.
Later that night, after the kids were in bed and I had imbibed some Jack Daniels and whooped her butt at Lord of the Rings Trivial Pursuit, I said to Sadie, “What’s with the pro-life bumper stickers? I mean, come on. I know you’re Catholic and all, but haven’t you gone a little bit overboard?”
Sadie replied with something I had not known. She told me she’d always been pro-life.
“I thought you were a feminist,” I said.
She answered, “I am.”
“Then how can you not support a woman’s right to choose?”
I don’t remember exactly how Sadie walked me through the pro-life argument. I know what she didn’t do, and that’s invoke religion or God in any way. At the time I would have described myself as an agnostic pantheist, so I would have immediately rejected such language.
After about an hour of back and forth, I knew I was had. I couldn’t argue with her anymore. Every talking point I had, she had shredded with logic and knowledge. But I was still wavering.
During the course of our conversation, she kept alluding to photos and what a large part they played in helping someone understand what abortion is. Finally — and this is important — I asked to see them.
She showed them to me, and I had a completely different reaction than the one I’d had when confronted with the accidental website, or protesters bearing signs. My reaction before had not been horror at the dead baby, but anger at the pro-lifer for making me look at it. I thought it was “disrespectful of the dead,” and somehow glossed over how disrespectful it was to cause that death.
But this time, I had just had my mind and heart opened. I had slowly over the course of an hour been made to hear the truth, and now I was ready to see it.
I looked at the photos, and I had a visceral reaction. No words formed. But something inside me, something simple and human, said, “That is not okay.” I knew that what I was looking at was a dead human being. I knew it.
At that moment, I was pro-life.
I kept saying, “You just made me pro-life!” I kept repeating it the next morning as well, awed by the change in me and how it had happened. It was completely unexpected, and more than a little unwelcome.
I went home and got on the computer and went immediately to pro-choice websites hoping to be unconvinced. Reality was setting in, and with it the understanding that a pro-life viewpoint was not compatible with my lifestyle, my friends, my political and religious beliefs, or my irreverent sense of humor. I felt a mild sense of panic, because if abortion was what I unfortunately now believed it was, then it was not only wrong, it was reprehensible. It was not just something I was going to disagree with, it was something I was going to have to fight.
The pro-choice websites couldn’t unconvince me of the wrongness of abortion, and the scientific information I found only made things worse. More than anything, I wanted to find those photos discredited as fakes or misleading, but instead I found more photos, and plenty of authentication. I found a video in which a former abortionist turned pro-life activist, Dr. Bernard Nathanson, handled an aborted fetus and described it to the viewer. I watched and wept.
I started to feel duped, and a little angry. I felt lied to by the pro-choice side. I felt the terminology they used, like “clump of cells,” was misleading. I knew the information my friends had gotten in abortion clinics, and I knew now that it was patently false.
At the time I was blogging on MySpace — remember MySpace? — and had a lot of readers. I posted about my newfound viewpoint with trepidation, and people went a little wild. Over the course of the next year, I would lose a few dear friends over this issue and similar ones. Other people have remained friends with me, but it’s never quite been the same. The issue is so divisive that it really can make or break friendships, I’ve learned, especially when you do what I did and become an overnight activist.
You see, I was committed to a belief in human rights before I became pro-life, and I understood more and more as time went on that abortion is the ultimate human rights violation. It violates the most basic right — the right to life — for the most innocent and helpless among us — the unborn baby. It is the ultimate in the kind of “might makes right” thinking people condemn when it comes to wars, but embrace when it comes to a mother’s tyranny over her pre-born child.
The night I learned that abortion was wrong, I would have told you I was not only not a Christian, but that I disliked and distrusted Christianity. Less than a year later, I was confirmed in the Catholic Church. This is not to say the pro-life philosophy leads one to religion necessarily. In fact, I know pro-lifers of every political and religious persuasion and sexual orientation. But for me personally, I believe God used this issue to open my heart and start me down a path that I never expected to walk.
In many ways, Sadie is a completely different person than on the night we had that conversation, and so am I. But we are still good friends, and we are both still pro-life. I owe her a huge debt of gratitude for having the courage to stand up for life in the face of someone who was pretty direct and challenging (that would be me), and the knowledge and wisdom to approach the issue from a secular, scientific point of view.
I am living proof of several things:
First, that it is essential for the pro-life apologist to be ready to tailor the argument to the person.
Second, that graphic images can absolutely change hearts when used correctly.
And third… Well…
You know that friend you have that you don’t even bother mentioning abortion to? The one who is so prickly and such a smarty-pants that you feel like you’d be shot down if you even tried explaining the pro-life viewpoint? I was that friend. And look at me now.
There is no heart that cannot be changed by truth.
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