I Used to be Anti-Abortion. This is Why I Changed My Mind.

Sep 28, 20219 min read

To those of you who didn't know me before 2014, you'll probably be surprised to learn that in the eighth grade, I gave a presentation on why abortion should be banned in the United States. Yes, really. Me—the woman who rages on a daily basis about the abuses women face on a social, political, and economic level. I willingly stood in front of my class and argued that abortion was murder and evil and wrong.

I was raised in a family of seven in a small, conservative town in Pennsylvania. Growing up, my family went to church every Sunday, and I regularly attended youth group on Wednesdays until I graduated high school. My parents didn't talk much about politics, but neither of them identifies as feminists and didn't raise any of their four daughters to be feminists (at least, not intentionally). At church, many of my mentors and role models told me that they weren't feminists because God didn’t create women to be equal to men.

With every adult around me teaching me that abortion was a sin, it was no wonder that I grew up believing them, and then parroting that same information at school.

After I finished presenting on why abortion was morally wrong and therefore should be banned in the U.S., my classmates were given the opportunity to ask me follow-up questions about my proposed legislation—and they didn’t hold back from asking me the tough questions. The Q&A snowballed, and I quickly realized that I didn't, and couldn't, have all the answers. I was frazzled and defensive, and I can’t even remember most of my responses, but I remember the spark of indignation I felt when my peers shot holes in my project in a matter of minutes.

While retroactively, I recognize this moment was likely a catalyst for my reckoning with anti-abortion legislation, at the time, I only felt embarrassed and too prideful to reassess my argument. It took me nearly another year before I stopped parroting anti-abortion rhetoric, and even longer before I fully changed my mind and my heart about my stance on abortion.

For much of my early life, my line of logic was simple: if you don't want to have a baby, then don't have sex. I’ll reiterate that I was raised in a Christian community where chastity and sexual abstinence were stressed—especially for women. Partnering this with the fact that I'm ace (something I didn’t realize or have language for until much later), I never really understood why it was a big deal to tell people to stop having sex if they didn't want to deal with the consequences.

But that’s where my argument first started to break down for me; pregnancy should not be a “consequence.” People—and Christians especially—love to preach about how pregnancy is a miracle, and yet, in the same breath, they use pregnancy as a punishment for promiscuous women. Didn't Christ preach (and lead a life) of love and compassion for others—especially marginalized communities? Didn't Jesus go out of his way to support and befriend promiscuous women? How is supporting anti-abortion legislation and outright attacking people who get abortions reflecting Christ's love, compassion, and support for marginalized communities?

The popular anti-abortion argument is that adoption is always an option; however, adoption still places pregnant people under a significant financial burden that no one should be forced to pay. The average cost for delivering a baby is $11,000, and that’s not factoring in prenatal checkups or complications during the delivery that would increase the price (C-sections, etc.). If you don’t have insurance, the delivery can be even more expensive—like, $40,000 more expensive. And then on top of that, if the person doesn’t put their child up for adoption, the parent is looking at upwards of another $1,000,000 spent on raising their kid.

If our government is responsible for criminalizing abortion and mandating that all pregnant people give birth, will our government also foot the bill for these mandated expenses? Or does do those potentially debilitating costs fall onto the parent to cover?

As I hope it's becoming more clear to you, restricting abortion is a far more complicated issue than declaring it "murder" and signing a bill to end it. Because the reality is, a government will never be able to end abortions, they will only ever end safe abortions—and usually, that's pretty exclusive to the most marginalized communities. People with social and capital influence will still find ways to circumnavigate the law, but already vulnerable and poor communities don't have that same luxury.

A quick perusal through history is all you need to know that abortions are nothing new—in fact, they've been happening for about as long as people have been able to get pregnant. Some of the earliest records of abortions date back to 1500 B.C.E. Yes, you read that correctly. Throughout history, people have always been willing to do what was best for them, even if the punishment for getting caught was death.

Do you truly think someone would insert cayenne pepper, or bleach, or turpentine into their vagina if they felt it wasn't absolutely essential? Would you be willing to beat your stomach with a meat cleaver if you weren't absolutely certain that pregnancy would be the worse option?

It's horrific what people have had to do in order to protect themselves, but more than that, it's tragic. Truly, I don't know how you can't cry when learning about the lengths desperate people will go to terminate their pregnancy. People deserve better than that. They deserve to be able to make the best choice for themselves without risking their lives to do so—either by the dangerous process of self-induced abortion or by the punishment of the law.

But these dangerous procedures didn't stop happening after Roe v. Wade. In fact, globally, pregnant people still face incredible difficulty accessing safe prenatal and maternity care, and a great deal of this is because the same laws that regulate and defund abortion clinics also regulate and defund centers specializing in providing safe and affordable healthcare to women and pregnant people.

And again, guess who these cutbacks and policies impact the most? (That's right; it's the people who were already most vulnerable and targeted by our culture.) As I've mentioned before, even in parts of the world with some of the most restrictive abortion laws and underfunded women's health clinics, people are still terminating pregnancies and accessing the care that they need, but only the most privileged and wealthy citizens are able to afford the costs of accessing proper medical care. This once again leaves marginalized people to suffer at the hands of laws that punish them for being poor and unable to afford better care for themselves. (For more information on what strict abortion laws look like in practice, I encourage everyone to read the resources I've listed below regarding Latin America's abortion laws and the correlation to violence against women.)

I very strongly believe that abortion access policies should be, at their core, dictated by compassion and empathy, not by judgement and contempt. When I started trying to put myself in the shoes of someone who was pregnant and did not want to be, I realized that there were too many nuances I hadn’t been taught by my church, or school, or parents—or nuances that I hadn’t wanted to consider—and I came to the conclusion that it wasn’t my place to judge someone for doing what’s best for them.

Because the reality is that abortion isn’t most people’s primary birth control method—and if it is someone’s primary birth control, shouldn't I be a little more sympathetic about why that is the case? I can’t imagine that making the choice to get an abortion, or financing one, is easy, so why should I make it worse by stigmatizing the procedure or supporting legislation that makes it even more difficult? (And even if the choice to terminate a pregnancy is easy for someone, is it really fair to punish them for making the choice that's best for them?) And if I’m being really, really honest with myself, I’m not positive that I would never get an abortion if I had an unplanned pregnancy. I’ve been lucky enough to never have been put in a situation where I need to know what I’d do, but until I’m in those shoes, I don’t think it’s my place—or anyone else’s—to condemn or criminalize a procedure that grants people autonomy over their lives and livelihoods.

I began writing this article back in July, and I set it aside because it was emotionally exhausting to pour my energy into writing and editing when I had so much to say, and I wanted to get it just right. Time got away from me, and I feared that I had missed the window for this article to be relevant to the abortion debates happening in the news at the time. But I should have known better than to think that July would be the last time abortion rights were on the chopping block in the U.S.. Abortion rights are back in the hot seat, merely two months later, and I feel compelled to share my history with the debate for and against safe abortion access.

Instead of opposing abortion, I've landed on the side of supporting people in all of their choices, even if it's not one I would personally make. To me, that means supporting other social and financial programs that truly make a difference in the lives of women and other marginalized communities. That means supporting comprehensive sex education for young people, affordable access to contraception, and expanding welfare programs to help low-income communities (and yes, for me, that includes extending aid to people who are immigrants, or drug users, or are otherwise stigmatized and marginalized in our country).

I firmly believe that all people are capable of change if they're willing to do the work. I changed my mind, and I have hope that there are others who are compassionate, empathetic people who simply need someone to ask them the tough questions. So, please, put down your biases, and sit with the discomfort this article might have raised for you. Meditate on it, pray about it; talk to people who work in women's healthcare and abortion clinics about their experiences and keep learning more about what the realities of criminalizing abortion look like. And please, advocate for the healthcare for women and pregnant people, because no one deserves to have their choices or body autonomy taken away from them. (You can do so now by contacting your representatives!)

Discussion Questions

Regardless of what your stance on abortion is, I highly encourage you to think critically about why you believe what you believe. I’ve provided some questions that I’ve found particularly helpful in my own wrestling, and hopefully they help you to articulate your stance in your own words. Take some time to sit with these questions, or write about it in a journal, or pray seeking answers, or engage with me in the comments or on social media.

Do you believe that people who were raped should be forced to give birth to their baby? What about in cases of incest?
Do you believe that children (anyone under 18—the legal age of adulthood in the U.S.) should be forced to carry their baby to term?
Do you think that people should be forced to give birth if the pregnancy puts their health or physical wellbeing at risk? What about their emotional health?
Do you think that people who cannot afford the cost of delivering a baby/being pregnant should be forced to give birth to their baby?
Do you think a person who has a familial history of postpartum depression should be forced to endure that for the sake of giving birth to a baby they do not want? What about someone with an eating disorder? Or someone who struggles with addiction?
Do you believe it is ever fair to force people to give birth to a baby they don’t want? Would your answer change if you were forced to give birth to a baby that you don’t want?
If you answered no to any of the above questions, how is a baby resulted from any of these situations different than any other baby’s right to life? How might it not be different?
Can you think of some reasons why a person might get an abortion?
In a perfect world, what would abortion legislation look like to you? Do you believe that your idealized laws would function well in the current political, social, and economic system?
Do you believe that government legislation will truly end all abortions?
Have you considered the implications of requiring every miscarriage to be investigated in order to determine whether it was self-induced or not? How could a person prove whether their miscarriage was intentional or not? Is it fair to make people relive trauma associated with losing a baby by having their miscarriage scrutinized in court?
Why do you or do you not think this way? Can your argument be separated from a religious belief?
Aside from abortion/anti-abortion legislation, what other laws or programs do you actively support (financially, volunteering your service, etc.) that support parents or people who are pregnant?