wfn.org | [PCUSANEWS] From pro-choice to pro-life

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Note #8308 from PCUSA NEWS to PRESBYNEWS:

 From pro-choice to pro-life
GA04017 
June 27, 2004

 From pro-choice to pro-life

Author tells story of her dramatic change of heart on abortion

by Eva Stimson

RICHMOND, June 27 - Frederica Mathewes-Green recalls her college days in the
1970s when she was an "earth-mother hippie feminist," so vehemently opposed
to violence that her wedding reception was vegetarian. In those days, she
said, she was also a strong supporter of a woman's right to abortion.

"But something happened to me," she told those who attended Saturday night's
dinner sponsored by Presbyterians Pro-Life.

Mathewes-Green, an award-winning writer and speaker, is the author of Real
Choices: Listening to Women, Looking for Alternatives to Abortion. She is a
regular contributor to Christianity Today and First Things, and her
commentaries have been featured on National Public Radio's "Morning Edition"
and "All Things Considered."

She was introduced by Terry Schlossberg, executive director of Presbyterians
Pro-Life, as "one of the most astute commentators on culture today."

"I was fighting against you," Mathewes-Green told her audience, composed
largely of people committed to ending abortion. "I thought you were stupid. I
thought you were nerds. But you were right, and I was wrong."

She said an essay she discovered one day while flipping through Esquire
magazine changed her thinking. The author, a doctor, described an abortion
procedure he had seen performed on a woman in her 19th week of pregnancy.

"This was a galvanizing essay for me to read," Mathewes-Green said.

She said she realized for the first time that "abortion is a violent, grisly
procedure," and knew she could not reconcile her pro-choice stance with her
opposition to child abuse, capital punishment and other forms of violence.

"I began to see that abortion was the opposite of feminism, that it
undermined feminism," she said, that instead of liberating women, abortion
has become "a bizarre new form of oppression."

Women do not really want abortions, she contended, comparing a woman's choice
of abortion to an animal's gnawing off his leg to escape from a trap.
"Abortion," she said, "is a tragic attempt to escape a desperate situation."

The challenge for pro-lifers, she said, is that society is inured to the
reality of abortion. "Women have organized their lives around it," she said.
"We're used to it."

She encouraged abortion opponents to help women considering abortion to see
that they can live without it, that they have better options. She urged
pro-lifers to work to prevent unwanted pregnancies and to support women
dealing with unwanted pregnancies.

Mathewes-Green said she was distressed to find, in doing research for her
book Real Choices, that 88 percent of women who had abortions did so "because
someone they loved told them they should."

Over and over, she said, these women told her, "If I'd had just one person to
stand by me, I would have had that baby."

This story and many others may have photos, media, video clips that can be
found at http://www.pcusa.org/ga216.htm.

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