How does it happen that a pro-choice feminist ends up changing her mind and working full-time in the pro-life movement?
While I cannot speak for every woman who’s done an about-face on the issue of abortion, I think my experience can be helpful in understanding how it can be that so many women who were once solidly in favor of the “right to an abortion” now passionately advocate for the right to life of the child in the womb.
I came to embrace the pro-choice philosophy based on the twin pillars of reasonability and convenience. I thought it was entirely reasonable that a woman should not be expected to bear a child she didn’t want. I also viewed it as terribly inconvenient to be pregnant when that had not been a woman’s desire. Abortions would happen anyway, I reasoned; therefore, they might as well be legal.
It is a curious paradox that, even though I viewed myself as well-informed on abortion (I became a part-time journalist during college and covered the abortion issue often), I was lacking many basic facts.
Prompted by a pro-life friend, I began perusing right-to-life literature. I was shocked. I had not known, for instance, that a heart starts beating 24 days after conception, or that brain waves can be detected 43 days after the unification of egg and sperm.
I was to the point of tears when I learned that, at 49 days post-conception, a preborn child resembles a little doll, with fingers, toes and ears. (This was not dissimilar to the “Aha” moment experienced by the main character in the film “Juno” when she learns that her unborn child has fingernails. The humanity of the preborn baby is a powerful argument against abortion.)
As a reporter, I had been led to believe by a spokeswoman from the abortion advocacy group NARAL that late-term abortions occurred only when the life of the mother was at stake. I subsequently learned that the real reasons behind partial-birth abortions could be far less convincing.
