Category: Quotes

This is how a woman became an abortion clinic escort.

First, she attended a pro-choice march.

“My participation in the pro-choice march was motivated by boredom and restlessness as much as by a desire to be of service. I had thought about getting involved in some kind of cause, but I didn’t know which one. Having been too young in the 60s to participate in the peace movement, I looked forward to attending a real political march. I didn’t attend the antichoice march held the same day because the newspaper letters to the editor with “pro-life” views seemed too cold, uncaring, and judgmental; one letter even said that any woman who died from an illegal abortion deserved to die.”

….

“One woman speaker at the post-March rally asked for volunteers to assist clients entering the Women’s Health Organization, the only women’s health care facility performing abortions in northeastern Indiana. First trimester abortions are performed at this clinic by an out of city physician (any local doctor doing abortions will be blackballed by the community in Fort Wayne, known as “the city of churches”).  As coordinator of clinic defense, the woman arranged for escorts to help those with appointments get past the antiabortion protesters. The escorts, both men and women, were volunteers with no official connection to the clinic. From her speech, escorting sounded like an exciting kind of service: necessary, different, dangerous, and more stimulating than stuffing envelopes. As a Christian, I also felt an obligation to work for justice and equality.”

Anne Eggebroten, ed Abortion: My Choice, God’s Grace (Pasadena, California: New Paradigm Books, 1994) 160

This shows that pro-lifers who say judgmental and cruel things about postabortion women drive people away from the movement. Had this person not been turned off from the pro-life cause, she might have ended up on the other side of the picket line.

From a woman who had an abortion because her baby would have been disabled:

“These girls, they just don’t want their babies. And it’s a good thing; what kind of mothers would they be, anyway? They’re here for a 2^nd, maybe a 3^rd, abortion. They can’t be worried to do the right thing. Later, maybe later they’ll understand. But it’s just craziness for us, being put into a cattle car with them. It’s a real mill, and what makes it worse is, the rest of them just don’t want their babies.”

Rayna Rapp Testing Women, Testing the Fetus: the Social Impact of Amniocentesis in America (New York: Routledge, 1999) 237

She feels that aborting a baby for fetal handicap is different from aborting for convenience. She also feels disdain for women who abort more than once. Surprisingly, this disdain is often shared by abortion providers.