“Changement”: To Change
The words “Casey v. Planned Parenthood” were scrawled on the chalkboard in the front of my classroom. At the Catholic school I attended, the nuns taught us about the barbaric act of people killing their unborn babies if they didn’t want them. The thought of something so heinous was unimaginable to me, that there were truly evil people out there with no regard for human life. It was scary to think that they were fighting for the “right” to commit unspeakable horrors, and they were winning.
In college, I remember espousing this belief to someone who commented, aghast, “Even in cases of rape and incest?!” I hadn’t thought about those situations. I paused. She continued, “You mean to tell me that if someone raped you and got you pregnant, you would have the baby?” I understood her point, but my upbringing was strong. “It would be hard, but I would hope that I’d find a way to value the life of that child.” She was silent.
But her question shifted my thinking. By my early 20s, I started to find a distinction between abortions that were the result of sexual violence like rape and incest, or were medically necessary to save the life of the mother, and abortions that women opted for when they just didn’t want to have a child. “If you make the choice to sleep around, you need to accept the consequences,” I would say with self-righteous judgment of such irresponsible women.
A few years later, I slept with a boyfriend for the first time (late bloomer, I know). The next day, I started to panic. What if the birth control failed and I got pregnant? I did not have the means to support a child on my own. I worked for the church; I could not get pregnant as an unmarried woman. I would lose my livelihood. I would become the shame of my entire family. My life would be over. In that moment, I knew with absolute clarity that my only option would be an abortion. I was surprised at how right I knew that decision would be, and how *not guilty* I felt.
It’s funny how prejudice rarely survives experience. Overnight, I became the woman I had condemned. Though I didn’t need an abortion, the experience showed me how the question of abortion becomes a lot more complicated when it’s no longer theoretical.
Over the next 15 years of ministry, I would come to see how the framing of abortion I received in my childhood wrongfully and purposefully distorts the complexity of the issue. As a priest, I would witness just how many reasons there are for needing to terminate a pregnancy. It is a unique honor we clergy have to walk alongside folks making these difficult and often devastating decisions, the facts of which are typically only known to their doctor and a few close family members or friends—and facts, I would come to see, that do not fit neatly into what I’d been raised to understand as the “pro-life” argument. My young, naive self would have condemned them all. But having rare access to the constellation of situations where terminating a pregnancy has been a necessary choice, it became clear to me that a consistent ethic of life requires safe and legal access to abortion, full stop.
It took years of life experience and some challenging questions to change my mind. Change does not always come quickly or easily. Like a changement in ballet, it requires preparation, strength, some time away from solid ground, and a reordering of your foundation before you land in a changed position.