My Pro-Life Story, Part 1

Once upon a time, I was pro-choice. I need to tell you the story of how I changed that point of view. (I promise, I tried to edit it down as short as I could, but it's still too long for one post, so I'll post it in parts.)

Like most 20-year-olds who can't imagine facing an unwanted pregnancy, and whose moral values primarily consisted of which fork to use at a formal dinner (okay, I wasn't quite that bad), I was mostly pro-choice, based on my understanding of the issues gleaned from extensive reading of Glamour magazine. I never thought much about it, of course; I guess I was one of those people who thought "I would never have an abortion myself, but it’s my body, and so it should be my choice." (Ugh.)

Fast forward to my 25-year-old self, chatting with a wise and wonderful colleague one afternoon at the office. We often discussed various current events and issues, and his thoughts on abortion went something like this:

“I used to think that as a man, I had no right to an opinion on this issue, because I could never fully understand it. But after a while that seemed pretty much of a cop-out, and I decided that it really all boils down to one’s definition of when life begins. Either life begins at conception, or not, and everything else logically follows from that.

“If you determine that life begins at conception, then abortion must actually involve taking away someone’s life. And it happens over 3,000 times per day in our country. If that were in fact happening, how could you remain silent about that? Wouldn’t that be like living in Nazi Germany in the late 1930’s, and looking away from the atrocities going on around you? Of course, you’d want to do anything you could to stop it, right?”

Well, that made some sense, I thought. Around that time I had another dear friend who was Catholic, had five younger siblings (which seemed quite amazing to me at the time), had a pro-life bumper sticker on his sporty little car, and who did things like attend pro-life demonstrations on the weekend.

"Interesting," I thought. "Let's go get some margaritas." (We were in San Antonio during this part of the story.) And that was about it, when I was 25. The whole thing didn't affect me much, and although I thought it was an interesting topic in an abstract and academic way, I was just going along, trying to be careful not to offend anyone or talk about anything too personal or controversial. Of course.

Continue reading here.