How does God’s love abide in anyone who has the world’s goods and sees a brother or sister in need and yet refuses help? Little children, let us love, not in word or speech, but in truth and action.
—1 John 3:17–18
As I detail in my first book, Women Rise Up, my relationship with Mary, the mother of Jesus, is complex. This has less to do with the biblical account of her life and more to do with the ways that she has been idealized and her story sanitized. We tend to dismiss her young age and forget the fact that being unmarried and pregnant was shameful, risky, and even dangerous. We overlook the state of her actual pregnancy and skip past the agony of her labor, neglecting how she first gave of her body and her blood to conceive, gestate, and birth Jesus safely and lovingly into the world. We forget that at the very beginning, she gave her consent to become a parent of the divine: “Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word” (Luke 1:38). The biblical text does not tell us that God first consulted Mary’s parents or her betrothed Joseph about the possibility of this pregnancy. This was her decision to make about her body and her future.
If we consider this central Christian story through the lens of a young person who gives consent, what might it offer us as we consider the reproductive freedom of pregnant youth today? How might our laws and policies change if we prioritized the autonomy and decision-making of young people, especially pregnant young people?
For the majority of young people under eighteen who need abortions, getting access is tough. Though laws differ state by state, most places require some type of parental involvement for a minor to obtain abortion care, whether through parental consent, parental notification, or both prior to their procedure. Of the twenty-one states that currently require parental consent, eight of them require notarized documentation, and three of them require the consent of both parents.1 Stop to think about what this process entails and demands of teenagers. Consider the possible complications and even dangers of a child having to share with their parents about their sexuality, pregnancy, and decision to have an abortion.
If a young person living in one of these states cannot obtain consent from their parent(s) or guardian, the only way they can access an abortion is to obtain a judicial bypass, which requires the cumbersome task of navigating the court system and pleading their case before a judge. Again, just imagine what is being required of these young people in order to access abortion care, standing in a courtroom and hoping to be shown compassion and understanding. Judges can deny a bypass for any reason. In the state of Texas in 2018, where two of the stories in this chapter take place, judges ruled to deny minors a judicial bypass in about 13 percent of all cases.2
Denying young people confidential, dignified, and comprehensive reproductive health care is reproductive oppression. Coercion of any kind, even if supposedly done in the best interest of a young person, is a violation of their human rights and the divine right that we each have to make moral decisions about our lives. Many doctors agree that confidential abortion care for young people ought to be a protected right. The American Academy of Pediatrics has taken an official stance against parental notification laws because interfering with teens’ reproductive health endangers their overall health and well-being. Their organizational position states, “There is no evidence that mandatory parental involvement results in the benefits to the family intended by the legislation. No studies show that forced disclosure results in improved parent-child relationships, improved communication, or improved satisfaction with the decision about the pregnancy outcome.”3 It goes on to say that while many minors voluntarily consult their parents and/or other trusted adults in making their decision to end a pregnancy, laws that force parental involvement can have a negative impact on family dynamics. Adolescents who come from dysfunctional families fear that telling their parents about their pregnancy would escalate familial conflict and violence. They’re right to be concerned. Studies have shown violence in abusive families increases when any member is pregnant.4
Legal restrictions harm young people and diminish their moral agency. What they need and deserve is the support of informed, trusted adults who can help guide them and provide resources as they make decisions about their bodies and their futures, whether that’s accessing abortion, choosing adoption, or deciding to parent. When we read the biblical account of Mary’s pregnancy, we see that she is not left alone to figure things out. The angel points her directly to her older cousin Elizabeth, who is also pregnant at the time and could offer support, care, and a safe place to stay. When Mary arrives, she doesn’t pass judgment or ask nosy questions; she greets her cousin with love.
Showing compassion to young people means that we shift our focus away from controlling their reproductive lives and toward understanding how we can be better allies to them. We can work to ensure that they get access to the resources, education, and support they need to make healthy decisions based on accurate information and their own inner knowing. Our role is to teach and model that kind of sacred decision-making from the time they are born, and that starts with providing age-appropriate, fact-based sexuality education.
Comprehensive sexuality education is critical to ensuring that every young person, and people of all ages, can make informed decisions based on their own conscience and values about their sexuality and reproductive lives. One of the best models is the holistic Our Whole Lives (OWL) program, developed by the Unitarian Universalist Association and the United Church of Christ, which offers age-appropriate curricula starting with children as young as kindergarten and going all the way to education for older adults. At every age, the program emphasizes “self-worth, sexual health, responsibility, justice, and inclusivity.”5 OWL is as much about developing self-knowing as it is about science.
Young people also need access to confidential, affordable health services like contraception counseling, testing for sexually transmitted infections (STIs), mental health care, and yes, abortion care. When we equip young people with the tools and support they need, we affirm them as moral agents and set them up to make decisions that best align with their values.
In this chapter, I’ll be sharing the stories of Lori, Veronika, and CoWanda, who faced obstacles in making decisions about pregnancies when they were in their teens. While Lori had her abortion many years ago, and Veronika and CoWanda had their abortions within the last few years, each of their experiences points to how often young people’s needs are silenced by the systems of power in place that claim to act in their best interests. I hope you are inspired and touched by their honesty as well as moved by their wisdom, resolve, and resilience.
As you take in their stories, remember that God trusted a young girl to make a profoundly sacred reproductive decision. Let us embrace that same spirit of trust and openness with young people today.
“Nobody grows up gracefully.”
More than fifty years have passed since Lori’s abortion, yet she still felt twinges of embarrassment bringing to mind what was going on in her young life in 1968. She was just a kid at the time, seventeen years old and fresh out of high school, when she slept with a boy she’d had a crush on. It was her first time having sex, and that very night she had a gut feeling that she was pregnant. Maybe she’d picked up on some of that Catholic guilt from all her years of parochial school. At-home pregnancy tests hadn’t been invented yet, but Lori didn’t need one. When her period was late, she picked up the phone to confide in a girlfriend that she was pregnant.
Lori comes from an interfaith family. Her father was a Jewish immigrant from Germany who lost most of his family in the Holocaust. Her mother, though not particularly religious, was raised Catholic. Lori grew up going to Catholic school, where she was fully indoctrinated in the church’s teachings, including opposition to abortion in all cases. Despite its enormous presence in her life, the Catholic faith never resonated with her on a personal spiritual level, though her connection to God was strong. As a teenager, Lori identified as spiritual but not religious at a time well before the rise of the religiously unaffiliated “nones” in the United States.
After learning of their daughter’s pregnancy, Lori’s parents called the boy’s parents over to their house to discuss it, but the boy himself was nowhere to be found. The whole scene was dramatic, Lori told me. The boy’s mother cried and made a snide remark about Catholic school girls always going after her son. But this stereotype hardly applied to Lori. She described herself back then as a lonely teen, immature in many ways, and sexually inexperienced. She said she felt like a “pregnant virgin.” Though she didn’t say it, I filled in “Like Mary.”
The following week was a whirlwind. Lori’s father called the local Jewish doctor in town, who confirmed the pregnancy before referring them to another Jewish physician based in Mexico City who could perform an abortion. Roe v. Wade was still five years away, and the best option for a safe procedure was to get one outside the United States. Lori was fortunate that her family had the means to travel there. Around Christmastime, she and her parents flew to Mexico and drove to a deserted medical facility. This was where Lori would have her abortion. When they got inside, the only other person there was the doctor himself. He administered a sedative intended to put Lori to sleep, though she remembers waking up in the middle of the procedure and feeling a pulling sensation. Perhaps it was her feet leaving the stirrups on the table, she guessed. Afterward, as her family was getting ready to depart the facility, the doctor said to them solemnly, “None of you will speak of this again.”
As we talked, Lori recalled that she was not the only girl in her high school to get pregnant, but as far as she knows, she was the only one who had an abortion. One girl got married and gave birth to a son, she remembered. Another was sent to a home for unwed mothers in San Francisco and placed her daughter for adoption. Lori is still friends with this woman, and she told me that years later, her friend was reunited with her daughter. “It was not a ‘happily ever after’ situation,” Lori said solemnly. In thinking about these different paths each of them took, Lori said, “There is no good answer when you find out that you’re pregnant when you’re seventeen. You have to make the choice that is best for you, but there is no good answer. Your life is going to go off course for a while.” But thanks to her family’s resources, Lori did have access to a choice most people did not have at the time: a safe abortion procedure.
I gave Lori a bit of background on the Clergy Consultation Service on Abortion (CCS), and while she is unsure of her doctor’s connection with them, I know there was a robust presence of faith organizers in California at the time referring pregnant people to reputable abortion providers and advocating to make abortion legal and accessible. In fact, right around the time that Lori discovered she was pregnant, the Clergy Counseling Service for Problem Pregnancies, based in California, went public with an article in the Los Angeles Times. Rev. S. Huw Anwyl, a United Church of Christ minister and organizer of the state chapter, recalled an instant surge in requests for their services: “The day after that story was in the Times, I had 293 calls [for abortion referrals].”6
The CCS did more than make referrals; they checked up on the providers to make sure their services were safe, sanitary, and compassionate. Members of the consultation traveled to places like Mexico City, one of the popular locations for abortion services outside the United States at the time, where they toured medical facilities, met with doctors, and ensured that the clinics were clean and the procedures were safe.7 While there is no way of knowing if Lori’s doctor was connected with the CCS, she likely directly benefited from the organizing of these compassionate doctors, clergy, and laity. In that way, she was incredibly fortunate.
But in the immediate aftermath of her abortion, Lori did not feel relief. She was struck with grief. “Throughout the whole experience, I was completely passive. I took no responsibility for anything. It was easy for me to feel like I lost my child because I did nothing proactive throughout the whole process,” she remembered. Every decision about what happened was made for her by her parents and doctors. She’d had no say in the matter. If given the opportunity to process her pregnancy and what she wanted to do, perhaps she would have made a different decision—maybe she would have continued the pregnancy—but she wasn’t given the autonomy to make her own choice.
She couldn’t talk about her abortion with her parents, and she shared only a little with friends. All alone in her grief, she mourned the loss of her pregnancy and the loss of her agency in the process. She imagined the baby she might have had and gave her a name. Then she started to move forward with her life. She enrolled in community college for two years and went on to complete a degree in social work. Through her studies, she wrote about her complicated feelings about the abortion. In time she got to a place of acceptance about what happened to her at that abandoned medical facility in Mexico City.
As much as she struggled with the abortion, and even though she ought to have had a say in the matter, she ultimately knew that it was the right decision for her at the time. Just a little over a decade later, when Lori was thirty years old, married, and more than ready to start a family, she gave birth to a daughter and named her Kristen Elizabeth, the same name she’d chosen for the daughter she didn’t have in her youth. “It was a full-circle healing experience,” she told me. “If I had continued that pregnancy in my teens, I wouldn’t have the children and grandchildren I have now.”
Today Lori works as a therapist in a town not far from where she grew up. I asked her if she ever has clients who want to discuss their own abortion experiences with her and what that’s like. She told me that occasionally, a client will disclose a pregnancy that they terminated, but in all of her years of practicing, no client has ever sought her services specifically because they had an abortion. Given the antiabortion rhetoric about emotional trauma after a termination, this was yet another piece of evidence, albeit anecdotal, that abortion is rarely the primary factor in a person’s emotional distress. That aside, I did want to know if Lori had any words of wisdom or advice for anyone who might be struggling spiritually with an abortion experience. She offered this insight: “Just because you feel sad doesn’t mean it was the wrong decision. I would recommend that you meditate on your feelings and listen to the voice within. To me that voice is the voice of God, and that voice will lead you to peace.”
Listen to the voice within. It will lead you to peace.
So many times we discourage people, especially those who are younger in years, not to listen to or trust their inward sense of knowing. But it is the very presence of this voice—whether we call it God, Spirit, our higher self, or something else—that guides us to a place of clarity, truth, and peace about even the most challenging decisions we make in our lives. The difficulties often come when we question our intuition or choose to ignore it altogether.
While Lori’s parents orchestrated her reproductive health care, the two young women in the following stories kept their abortions from their families. What I admire so much about them is their resolve to seek out the resources and assistance they needed in order to make the best reproductive decisions for their lives at the time, even when the law tried to stand in their way.
“I admire myself for being that strong and having to do that completely by myself and not with my family involved.”
Veronika was on the brink of an exciting new chapter. She had graduated from high school at the top of her class and was making plans to attend her college orientation when she discovered that she was pregnant. “I was hysterical,” she said. “I didn’t know what was going to happen.” She knew she needed an abortion, but she didn’t know how to get one. Veronika lives in Texas, one of thirty-eight states that requires parental notification and consent for minors to get an abortion. She knew getting one of her parents on board was impossible. Her dad lived in a different state, and her relationship with her mom was rocky at best. Veronika didn’t want to tell them that she was pregnant in the first place, much less tell them that she needed an abortion.
The only way Veronika could get an abortion was to request a judicial bypass in court. As I shared previously, this undue legal burden on young people can be a nearly insurmountable challenge. The process delays care and creates additional stress by requiring minors—who sometimes are represented by pro bono attorneys but not always—to argue that they are capable of making a reproductive decision on their own. It’s up to the appointed judge to determine whether they can access care. As Veronika shared her experience with me, I thought about myself at seventeen years old, preparing to go to college. What would it have felt like to have to plead my case in a courtroom and know that my fate was in the hands of a stranger?
Thankfully, Veronika did not have to go through this process alone. After doing some research, she discovered an organization called Jane’s Due Process that specifically works with pregnant minors to provide them with the legal, medical, and financial help they need to access abortion care. She was able to text their staff about her situation confidentially, and they quickly responded with everything that she would need to do, step-by-step. First, she would need to visit a clinic and get an ultrasound. They told her that even if she didn’t have the funds, she should go ahead and get the ultrasound done, and they would help her to pay for it. Next, she would need to meet with a lawyer that Jane’s Due Process would provide at no cost to figure out a game plan.
Veronika was a little skeptical at first. She had never heard of this organization. Was all of this real? Were they actually going to help her, or was there some kind of catch? She was right to be suspicious. Not every organization that gives off the appearance of helping pregnant people is actually supportive of their decisions. For example, crisis pregnancy centers, or CPCs, are antiabortion organizations that advertise themselves as health clinics. Often, they offer free services like ultrasounds as a means to get pregnant people in the door and then give misinformation to dissuade them from getting an abortion. Unsurprisingly, most CPCs are run by conservative Christian charities.
Following the plan outlined by Jane’s Due Process was Veronika’s only pathway to care. When she called to schedule the ultrasound, the clinic staff told her there would be no upfront fee—that Jane’s Due Process had covered it already. She was relieved and reassured that she could trust this organization to help her. Item by item, Veronika checked off what she needed to do in order to be eligible for the judicial bypass. Staff helped her find most of the money for her procedure through an abortion fund. Abortion funds are organizations that step in where the federal and state governments have opted out, helping people pay for their abortions and sometimes covering other associated costs related to travel, childcare, and missed work. More than eighty funds currently provide this kind of assistance, but in 2019, they were only able to help about one-quarter of all the people who called.8 The demand far exceeds the resources available.
Veronika’s last step before her abortion was getting the judicial bypass. She was referred to a reputable lawyer who would advocate on her behalf before the judge. Two weeks after she first texted the hotline about her situation, a judge granted Veronika the legal exemption she needed to schedule her abortion without parental notification.
Those weeks between discovering she was pregnant and getting her judicial bypass felt like an eternity, especially as she was doing it in secret. With loads of logistics to manage, she had no space to deal with any of her feelings about it all. One of the biggest challenges was paying for her abortion. Jane’s Due Process pitched in $200, but she still had to come up with an additional $400. She was a high school student with no job or savings, and she could not turn to her parents for help. Fortunately, she had the support of her partner and his family. They drove her to all the appointments and managed to come up with resources to cover the remaining cost of her procedure, even though it was a financial strain on them. Finally, with the paperwork in hand and the assurance that the abortion would be paid in full, Veronika was able to get her abortion scheduled.
The same day as her medication abortion, just hours after leaving the clinic, Veronika moved from her hometown of McAllen to San Antonio, where she would soon start her new life as a college student. With all she had going on, from moving into an apartment, to finding a job, to enrolling in classes, she didn’t have much of a chance to process her abortion experience after the fact either. But she could see that it was having an impact on her life. Her relationship with her partner started to break down. She felt isolated and a little bit ashamed. Some of the religious messages from her childhood started popping into her head. “I thought God was never going to forgive me. But I couldn’t tell anyone how I thought I was going to hell,” she said. Although Veronika was at peace about her decision to end the pregnancy, the religious beliefs about abortion she had absorbed as a child caused her to doubt herself. More accurately, it dictated her beliefs about what she thought she should be feeling about her abortion. Even though she truly believed that she was making the right decision to have an abortion, that self-assurance itself felt wrong to her. She had internalized the idea that the only “right” response to having an abortion was to feel guilty, even though what she felt was not guilt but relief. No matter when we heard it or whether we actually believe it, this kind of toxic theology rooted in judgment and shame can have long-lasting impacts on the ways we view ourselves. When we feel pain, we experience it as divine punishment.
About a year after her abortion, the team at Jane’s Due Process connected Veronika with Youth Testify, a project of We Testify that is devoted to young people telling their abortion stories publicly on their own terms. After feeling so isolated in the aftermath of her abortion, Veronika now had the support of a community of peers who understood what she had gone through. She became close friends with another storyteller who talked about how her faith helped her through her abortion. Veronika finally felt ready and equipped to work through her own complicated feelings. In time, she began to heal.
Later Veronika joined the team at Jane’s Due Process and helped other young people get the care and support they needed. Though reproductive justice is one of her passions, Veronika is pursuing her professional dreams of becoming a mechanical engineer. When she looks back on her abortion at seventeen, she knows it was the best, most mature decision she has made in her life. In an interview for We Testify, she wrote that her abortion was “a life saver and a blessing,” something that ensured she could pursue engineering and create the life for herself that she desired and deserved. She said, “Every day I’m reminded that having an abortion was the best decision I have ever made.”9
“My parents didn’t know that they loved someone who had an abortion.”
Before I started my interview with CoWanda, I could already sense her intimate connection with the divine. From her vibrancy to her convictions, everything about her revealed this inner light of love and truth, evidence of her deep faith and spirituality. Though only twenty-one at the time we spoke, her wisdom was breathtaking.
CoWanda had just moved back into her father’s house in west Dallas when we connected. She shared that she’d been a toddler when her parents split up, and her dad got remarried to her stepmom. CoWanda calls her “Mom,” since she’s been part of her life for as long as she can remember. She went back and forth between her parents’ homes, which were radically different households. CoWanda’s father had a conversion experience and dedicated himself to serving God and his community through church. At his house, there were high expectations and strict values, a kind of legalism as CoWanda described it. She didn’t share many of the details about what that entailed, but it was severe enough that at the age of seventeen, CoWanda broke ties with her father and his wife. They had no contact at all for an entire year.
Living full time with her biological mother was chaotic. They moved three times in a single academic year, and CoWanda grew weary of the constant disruption to her life. She told her mom that she was going to live with a friend, but in truth, she was moving in with an abusive partner. “Terrible things were happening to me physically, sexually, and emotionally in that relationship,” she confided. Three weeks before her high school graduation, she discovered that she was pregnant.
She had friends and cousins who’d become parents in their teens. Sometimes, before she was pregnant, she wondered if she wanted to have a baby like they did. When the possibility was a reality, not just an idea, she had a frank conversation with God. “Is this what you want for me, God?” she asked. And in response, she heard, “Is this what you really wanted?” She had scholarships to college. She had her whole promising life ahead of her. She didn’t want to have a baby right now. She needed an abortion.
Like Veronika, CoWanda is from Texas, and she had to navigate the same cumbersome judicial bypass laws. She shared, “I didn’t know enough about abortion, only that I knew I needed one at the time.” Once again, Jane’s Due Process served as a lifeline, and with their help, she got the care she needed, but the whole legal process felt unjust. In an article she wrote for Rewire, CoWanda asserted, “As a Black woman who has seen the corruption and injustices of our justice system in my own family, I couldn’t wrap my head around the idea of going through such a criminalizing experience to access abortion care.”10
When I asked CoWanda about her abortion experience, she described it as spiritual. As a child, she had watched her mother navigate the medical system, which as a low-income family was never accommodating to them. The abortion clinic was the exact opposite: warm, flexible, and caring. Reflecting on the procedure room, she recalled how the staff were dressed in all white and how she felt “surrounded by angels.” She has written about feeling God’s presence in the room with her. “Getting an abortion was not the scariest thing I had experienced in life,” she shared. Growing up in poverty, being molested as a child, being in an abusive relationship—these were traumas. Her abortion was not.
After the procedure, CoWanda waited for her abuser to pick her up, but the hours went by, and he never showed. Eventually, it was time for the clinic to close. While the staff waited patiently for her to find a ride, for the first time she felt completely alone. Then the realization hit her: if she had continued the pregnancy, she would have been this alone all the time, caring for a baby by herself. “To think that I would feel that sense of isolation and loneliness, with an innocent life that I would have to take care of—I was in no position to be a parent,” she stressed.
She needed a way out of this abusive relationship, so after a year of no contact, she decided to reach out to her father. “My dad saw my cry for help and knew what was keeping me there,” she remembered. He offered her a job at a Christian camp in Missouri, where she once had been a camper. This was her opportunity to break free. She spent the summer in the beautiful, secluded campus, where she had space to breathe and to just be. Beneath the canopy of trees along the shores of the camp’s serene lake, she journaled, prayed, and processed everything about her life back in Dallas. As the weeks went by, she felt a growing sense of peace and reconnection with herself, the universe, and God.
Her job at camp was with the kitchen staff. As the team prepared meals, they shared with each other about their lives back home. Everyone was involved in their communities. Whether they were leading youth ministries, working as teachers, or doing volunteer work, all of them lived out their faith in action. CoWanda was inspired and challenged by what she heard. She wanted nothing more than to live into the purpose God had for her life. What was it God was calling her to do? She confided in one of her team members about the abuse and the abortion. She responded to CoWanda’s story with love and affirmation: that CoWanda had made the best decision for her life and that sharing her abortion story was important and needed.
Not everything about working at the camp was quite so idyllic. Having been a camper herself, she knew that many of the youth attending the camp came from tough situations. Many of them dealt with poverty, abuse, and food insecurity just like she had. As she listened to the camp counselors talk about God, she found some of their messages harmful and based in shame. She spoke up about her concerns, that they weren’t being careful with the ways that they were talking about Christ. They had little understanding of where the kids were coming from. What they needed was love and understanding, not more fear.
No one took her seriously. As a member of the kitchen staff, who were predominantly Black women, she wasn’t regarded with the same esteem as the predominantly white staff leaders. Three weeks into the camp season, she was ready to pack up her stuff and head back to Texas. She sent her dad a long email with an idea and a challenge: their family should offer this kind of ministry in west Dallas because they understood the needs of the people. They had the opportunity to share about God in loving, compassionate ways.
Despite her frustrations with some of the power dynamics, CoWanda decided to stay at camp for the rest of the summer. As she was finishing up her time there, she got an email from one of the team members at Jane’s Due Process. This happened occasionally—they would reach out with opportunities to volunteer or get more involved. The timing had never felt right. But this message intrigued her. She had been nominated for a storytelling cohort specifically for young people who’d had abortions. She wondered if this was her answer to prayer. Was this what she was supposed to say yes to? One major obstacle stood in her way: the retreat was in Boston. She couldn’t afford to get herself there from Missouri. When she learned that everything—her transportation, lodging, and meals—would be taken care of, she took it as a divine sign. She told the team, “I’ll be there.”
Just days after finishing up her job at the camp, CoWanda attended the first-ever Youth Testify retreat hosted by We Testify. She was a bit apprehensive about participating; she wasn’t sure how she would be received by the group. In her conversations with the retreat planning team, they had put a lot of emphasis on the fact that she was a young woman with a strong Christian faith. She worried that she might be stepping into yet another place where she wouldn’t be taken seriously. At the camp, when she raised her concerns about the injustices happening there, she was ignored. Would this be more of the same?
When she arrived in Boston and met the other storytellers, she immediately felt an embracing, accepting love from the group. Finally, she was ready and in a place where she could begin to start healing her life. During the retreat, she learned how her personal experience with abortion was connected to a much larger political, social, and historical reality of oppression. She knew this intrinsically—this was what she had tried to name at camp. But the facilitators gave her a framework and a language through which she could start to make sense of her life in a new way. She said that until then, she had known nothing of the reproductive justice movement (which I will talk more about in the next chapter), but it immediately rang true for her. “I learned about why I’d been struggling and about the systemic oppression that exists to hold Black and brown people back,” she explained.
I was struck by the truth that what CoWanda had expected to experience at the Christian summer camp she found instead at the Youth Testify retreat. Even though some of the retreat participants were not religious or spiritual, they showed her the love of God. They cared for her, listened to her, and honored her story. She knew that this was the space for which she had prayed: “This was how I was going to achieve my utmost healing and how I was going to get my family on track for healing. This was how I was going to become whole.” There at the retreat, among this new community of loving support, she felt moved to share the whole truth about her abortion, and she has been talking about it ever since.
Both camp and the retreat concluded with a call to action: go back to your community and share your truth. With clarity and resolve, she began to tell her faith-filled abortion story with a boldness and a confidence in God’s love. At her first public speaking event, one of the founders of Jane’s Due Process, an older white man, came to her in tears. He was moved by her story, and he couldn’t believe he’d had a hand in saving a young woman’s life. And that’s exactly what CoWanda’s abortion experience did for her: it saved her life.
No longer silenced by shame and stigma, she embraced the unconditional love of God for herself and for all people. She laughed, “The anti-choice people hate me because I thank God for my abortion.” She wrote her first public article for Teen Vogue and shared it on social media, knowing she would get pushback from Christians in her life. She sighed, “God is so tired of what is holding us in chains.” CoWanda knows that her work is to help others break free like she did.
She is determined to keep sharing her story with more and more people. She said, “I have to talk about [my abortion experience] all the time. Otherwise, I let others talk about my experience for me.” Her story is a powerful testimony of how abortion is a blessing. She wrote in a piece for Blavity, “My journey to have an abortion and care for myself strengthened my relationship with God and showed me how personal and intimate religion truly is. From my faith and my abortion, I know firsthand that abortion is a blessing. It is a blessing for parents, families and all people. And I know the life I love so much today—a life where I am more deeply connected to my family, my community and my God than ever—would have been impossible without it.”11 The decision to have an abortion is a sacred choice. For young people in particular, it is often a marker of their growing up, of claiming ownership and responsibility for their lives and futures. Abortion access is essential for young people. Without it, Lori, Veronika, CoWanda, and so many others would never have had the opportunity to pursue their dreams and callings of helping others find healing.
Laws that restrict abortion access for young people assume that they lack the capacity to make a sound, informed decision on their own. Parental notification and consent laws are unjust and out of touch with the reality that many young people have had to navigate their own survival long before they needed an abortion. We need to bring an end to these dehumanizing practices that require far too many young people to beg to have their reproductive freedom recognized by a judge. The decision of when to become a parent is a sacred one, and young people deserve better than having their fate left in the hands of adult strangers in courtrooms.