What changed my heart and made me Pro-Life?
- Jennifer DeFrates
- May 25
- 6 min read
Updated: May 27
The views expressed by the author do not necessarily reflect those of the Abortion Museum. However, we do post content from both sides of the issue in order to foster intelligent discourse.
A Christian blogger being pro life is not very surprising, but what might surprise you is that I was pro choice much of my life.
It’s still really hard to admit. About 20 years ago, God began to get ahold of my heart in a way that changed everything I thought I knew.
My pro-choice argument went something like this:
Life begins at conception, but it is my religious belief in the Bible that informs my position. I do not believe abortion is a good choice and would never encourage a friend to have an abortion, but I don’t have the right to force my religious beliefs onto others.
I was terribly wrong.
While my Bible tells me that God chose me before the formation of the world (Eph. 1:4), formed me in my mother’s womb (Jer. 1:5), and knit together every fiber of my being (Ps. 139:13) with a plan for the good works (Eph. 2:10) that He has set before me to do . . .
Life doesn’t begin at conception because my Bible says so. My Bible says so because life begins at conception.
So how did I get off-track in the first place?
I allowed myself to fall prey to faulty and deceptive propaganda like this . . .
“It’s just a clump of cells.”
It wasn’t so bad to be pro-choice if the fetus, embryo, baby is just a clump of cells. A clump of cells can be cancer, so what’s the big deal?
I had to be willing to see that we are image bearers of God from the moment of conception. And it was the science that made me see the truth first.
A clump isn’t just a clump when it’s a fertilized human embryo.
Even at the very early stages of fertilization, a human embryo acts independently. The cells divide, multiply and differentiate on their own with DNA that is wholly unique to that individual. They try to live, even outside the mother’s womb, which makes them autonomous beings with full humanity from the beginning.
The spectrum of human life begins with the zygote according to MANY scientists, dating back to the early 70s. We knew the truth just years after Roe v. Wade.
Eventually I realized my beliefs about being pro-choice had been established through ignorance and propaganda stuck in 1973, not careful research or even logical thinking.
My thinking was stuck in 1973 propaganda, not logic or research.
I look back at my simplistic thinking (and radical rebellion against God and my parents) and realize I spent many years unwilling to look at the truth.
Again, I believed at conception God creates life. But I somehow believed that only a handful of Bible verses supported that position; that science was on the side of abortion. Boy, was I wrong. Science has known that it's a unique human being from the moment of fertilization for a long time. Embryology textbooks clearly taught this without reservation for decades. It is a complete human being at a very early stage of development, but is exactly the same as we all were at one time.
Before ultrasound technology, the intricacy of fetal development was not common knowledge nor as irrefutable as it is today. And I found it too easy to accept the popular lies when everyone believed them. (How do you know to even look for the truth when everyone is repeating the same lies."
I kept arguing that Planned Parenthood performed more health services than abortions. I had totally bought the 3% statistic/lie that they perpetuate and kept arguing with a friend over it. But the truth of that statistic is like calling ketchup a vegetable because it’s made from tomatoes.
Understanding how deeply the deception ran began to change my heart.
The first real step in my journey was seeing the 3D ultrasound of my niece and nephew. At the time, only high risk pregnancies had this new technology, and I remember being shocked at the clarity. Really seeing these little people in the womb was powerful. I remember tearing up at my desk staring at these tiny, perfect miracles growing inside my sister.
Until then, I had managed to keep woefully ignorant of how fetal development works. Looking at these precious babes, I knew they were people with futures and hopes, created by God with purpose to do big things.
But even that didn’t change my thoughts about early abortion until images of fetuses at mere weeks confronted me, and I began to seek the truth.
We know all human life has intrinsic value, so we use the debate about when life begins as a smoke screen. Because we know when human life begins. The issue then becomes when we ascribe personhood to the embryo.
Which has nothing to do with science, despite the claims of the abortion’s proponents.
When we assign value to the embryo has nothing to do with science.
It has to do with our worldview.
Personhood is a metaphysical (or religious) belief. It is not grounded in objective standards we can measure or mark. When we try to use standards, we end up removing personhood for born people as well. Some born people are dependent on care for their lives. Some born people aren't capable of forming memories. They are still persons who deserve life. When we assign value to what we can do versus what we are, we create a nebulous standard that ends up defining our humanity far more than it does the humanity of the person we are trying to unperson (just like it did when pro-slavery advocates tried the same tactics.)
Here is where I failed in my thinking:
My worldview had become cloudy through traumatic events and sins of my choosing, but falling away from a relationship with God changed who I believed I was and what I believed identity is.
I wanted to embrace the “freedom” of living however I wanted and the liberal ideology that encouraged reckless, immoral abandon over stodgy self-discipline and restraint. (Sidenote: I was never more a slave than when I lived in the world’s ‘freedom’, and have never been more free than living in submission to Christ.)
Secondly, I was not prepared to do real intellectual battle with people over ideas. I wasn’t grounded in truth enough to stand for it.
It’s still hard to do as a mature adult, even knowing how to better share the truth about abortion with my pro-choice friends.
But someone must stand up for the babies.
Seeing how precious and loved I am by God, made me love others in that way. And I became pro life out of the extension of His love for me and the grace offered by Jesus for my sins.
And I realized – that ‘someone’ standing for truth needs to be ME.
I would still agree that I don’t have a right to force purely religious beliefs onto others (rather I share in love). But when reality demonstrably aligns with those beliefs, we need to create laws based on truth, even if it’s not popular, especially when protecting those who cannot protect themselves.
As a teenager, the tolerant and loving thing seemed to be to let everyone believe whatever they wanted. But letting people do whatever they want isn’t the same as loving them. Sometimes loving someone means helping them through the hard things instead of nodding and smiling at poor choices.
Abortion seems more convenient than facing the consequences of an unplanned pregnancy.
But no one talks about the real consequences of abortion. Most women are never the same. They grieve. Often, they experience physical consequences. Some women lose their fertility. Some live in denial that it affected them at all, but seem angry and defensive.
Abortion doesn’t eliminate going through something deeply difficult.
Becoming pro life has done more than make me want to protect babies. It has given me a heart to love the women facing this decision. We need to create alternate ways to support families facing unplanned pregnancies, and changing the entire way our culture, especially Christians, treats unplanned pregnancies.
And we need to openly love those who made the decision to get an abortion. Their lives are sacred to God just as surely as the babies. They need us to listen and love in truth and gentleness more than judgment and scorn.
Being pro life means all lives matter.
Original Post: February 23, 2019
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