Below is an article by Abigail Favale, a one time feminist who recently became a member of the Catholic church. Her change in attitude and desire to join the church was motivated in part through her pregnancy. I have provided just a small part of an article I found on Tim Challies blog (go to Challies.com and click on Weekend A La Carte to read the article in its entirity).
When I served a church in South Carolina I was asked to serve on the Board of Directors for the Pregnancy Center and Clinic for the Low Country, located on Hilton Head Island. The head of the center asked every month for an ultrasound machine. She was convinced it would save the lives of babies. Over time we raised the money to make the purchase.
Each month, as she gave her report to the board, she provided one significant number, the number we all looked for - the number of women who decided to keep their babies after seeing them through the ultrasound we provided them. I could be wrong but if women contemplating an abortion would wait long enough to have an ultrasound done, more babies would live.
His coming was a cataclysm: Julian, my firstborn. Something I both knew would happen and could never have anticipated.
Even before he came, when his toothpick bones were welding together in my womb, he began to change me. Especially with that second ultrasound, a sustained peek inside his world within me. The first early ultrasound had found a cyst on our umbilical cord, which could indicate a congenital abnormality, so we went in for another ultrasound to see how he was doing.
We were only twelve weeks in, just ten weeks after conception. The last time I had seen him on that murky gray screen, he had been only a lima bean huddled inside a life-giving bubble, his heartbeat a tiny window that opened and opened and opened. He was a baby then, a miniscule human, but I had to stretch my imagination to see it. Here we were, just a few weeks later; I assumed he would be a bean still, only bigger.
But no! He was still small enough that we could see his whole body at once on the screen. He was huddled no longer, but kicking and bucking around, the bubble of my womb his playpen. His head was round and perfect, his brain bloomed like cauliflower as he sucked his thumb and paddled his legs. I was shocked at how quickly he had become recognizably, indisputably human. Still within the first trimester.
His brain in full bloom. His limbs on parade, waving and churning in his amniotic ocean. His heart with its syncopated chambers, an undeniable herald: I’m alive, I’m alive, I’m alive.
In that moment, catching a glimpse of the carnival inside my womb, I began to feel unsure about what I thought I knew. Though I had never been entirely comfortable with the idea of abortion, the first trimester had always seemed like an ambiguous safe zone to me. Later on, yes, it is pretty hard to argue that the unborn fetus is not a human being—but that first third of the pregnancy, that was before the baby was really a baby, right?
Seeing this declaration of humanity on the ultrasound screen only ten weeks after we lit the spark of his existence—this undeniable reality began to erode what I thought I knew.
The erosion intensified the following June, when I was months into new motherhood. Wendy Davis, a state senator from Texas, was making headlines during her eleven-hour filibuster on the senate floor that blocked a controversial abortion bill. I remember sitting on my couch, watching the news coverage, feeling inspired. Twitter was exploding with adulation, feminists raising a battle cry in support of Davis and her pink sneakers, and I was caught up in the excitement, watching a woman make history in her defense of other women.
Tweets started flying from women who had abortions, proclaiming their choice proudly as a way of support. In the midst of the fray, a fellow writer I knew tweeted her chagrin at never having had an abortion, which prevented her from fully joining in the revelry. I read this tweet, just a string of offhand characters quickly lost in the flurry, and my enthusiasm chilled over. I had been pro-choice for years, like any good feminist, but this lauding of abortion as some kind of jubilant rite of passage, a cause for celebration, was a sentiment that stopped me cold. My unborn son at twelve weeks, a thriving tiny human on parade—this image rushed into my mind, a courier bearing a message I did not want to hear, but could no longer ignore.
Every dehumanizing ideology succumbs to the same temptation: to see the undesirable other as a non-person, and thus disposable. In this distorted light, the disposal of the unwanted person becomes not only morally permissible, but meritorious, a praiseworthy act. I have come to recognize that there is never a safe way to draw a dividing line between “human being” and “person.” That line, even when drawn with the best of intentions and the loftiest ideals, leads to gravest evil.
