There was a girl I worked with at my first job after college. She was around twenty years old, had two kids under the age of five (I think she'd had her first baby at fifteen), had two divorces and then she found out she was pregnant again. For some reason, she came to me about it, we talked about it and she told me she was considering an abortion. Welcome to the real world.

I grew up in a very sheltered and fundamentalist Christian family. My K-12 schooling was spent at a small Christian school that was connected with the church I attended. During my teen years I had my own salvation experience, went to a one year program of intensive Bible study and then attended three years of college at Cedarville College--A Baptist School of the Liberal Arts. During my latter two years at Cedarville I began to move away from the party line when it came to religion and by the time I left the school I was actively searching for some spiritual expression that better fit me than fundamentalist Christianity.

All of this to say that I grew up surrounded by the Pro Life perspective and if I'd been asked at the time, I would have identified myself with that point of view. I'd even picketed an abortion clinic once or twice when I was in college. Further, I'd been adopted as a baby and had always assumed that had abortion been legal at the time, odds were I wouldn't be here today. Nothing had occurred in my period of rethinking Christianity to cause me to doubt the Pro Life position. Of course, I'd never met a woman who was in a position to need an abortion, either.

Talking to that girl at work I pretty much instinctively gave her the advice that I would give someone today in the same position. You don't have the resources or skills to raise another child, you need to do what's best for yourself and for the children you already have. I may not have used those exact words, I probably softened the language a bit, but that was the gist of it. I could have done the run around and suggested she have the baby and give it up for adoption but how can you tell a person to do that when they would eventually not be able to work b/c of the pregnancy and still have to feed and raise two children? There are people for whom the availability of safe and legal abortion is necessary.