I am a grandma, about to turn 50 this year.
It could have been different, and I would never have known.
In 1979, on my 17th birthday, I got pregnant. When I found out I was pregnant, I did not know what to do, so I went to see someone I trusted.
She said some very brave words to me: there are two people in this situation and the most important one is not you.
This made me begin to think. When I went for my pregnancy test at Planned Parenthood, the lady said to me, "Why AREN'T you having an abortion?"
My boyfriend was a person of almost no convictions or even opinions. So when he expressed his view that abortion was wrong, it had particular weight with me.
As I walked through those early days, I would feel abandoned by him (I was too much trouble and not a barrel of laughs anymore) and confused but increasingly I knew that I would carry this baby to term.
The thing to realize is that this wasn't a brave choice for life. It was a young girl struggling through finding her way through a maze of decisions and feeling a lot of pressure to abort.
The pressure today must be tremendous.
