The day I became pro-choice | Guest Post by Paulla Rich Estes

I believed abortion was murder, until working at a Christian “crisis pregnancy center” changed my mind

Amid Life is, at its heart, about resilience. I post weekly about my career and personal reinvention, and I’ve invited some friends to share their stories using a simple prompt:

Tell us about a moment when everything changed.

Today’s moment-of-change story comes from Paulla Estes, a book coach, writer, and recovering Christian. Follow her heart-wrenching story of childhood trauma and midlife recovery from evangelicalism’s hypocrisy.

---

It’s 2014. I trained for months to be a pregnancy counselor, all based on the unwavering belief that abortion is murder. Now, when my very first client at the crisis pregnancy center says she needs an abortion, I’m shocked at my unexpected desire to help her get one.

Maya¹ sits with her back to a shelf lined with life-sized, hard-plastic fetuses in various stages of development. She’s wearing a sleek skirt and dark blazer; her hair is in a neat ponytail. Her paperwork says she’s thirty-eight, married, with a son.

She wipes her nose with a ragged tissue and whispers, “I can’t be pregnant.”

I try to shake it off and concentrate on my training—get her talking and earn her trust. Make her think I’m in this with her.

My hands sweat as I follow the memorized script. “Maya, an unplanned pregnancy can feel like a shock. Do you want to talk about it?”

“Well, I got into a fight with my husband and drove to a bar. I had a few drinks.” She shakes her head. “I don’t know. I think I blacked out. I woke up in my car. I, I think there was a man.”

Janet, my supervisor who is observing, cuts in with a gentle voice. “Maya, were you assaulted?”

“I don’t know.” Maya cries. “I just need an abortion.”

Janet glances at me, and I blink at her, my heart hammering.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “We don’t do abortions here.” Then she presses Maya. “Wouldn’t you like to think about it for a few days?”

Maya shakes her head. “My husband said I’d better not come home pregnant. If I continue this pregnancy,” she goes on, tears running down her cheeks. “I’ll lose my husband, maybe even my son.”

Jesus. The husband’s veiled threat sinks into my chest like a hatchet.

Indoctrinated by the religious right

I’d believed abortion was murder ever since a long-haired couple came to my Catholic high school to teach about family planning.

The bearded man in a skinny tie sat on the edge of my religion teacher’s desk, his wife next to him in a loose denim jumper. The husband picked up a large, stiff poster and held it under his chin. The windows at our backs illuminated the blown-up image, and the class went still.

Tiny hands, feet, arms, a spine, and a closed-eyed face—disconnected but held together with a mishmash of blood and pulp. The picture was over-enlarged and pixelated, the miniature fingers the size of my forearm.

I stared open-mouthed. My saliva glands activated nausea. I’d seen slasher movies, but this was far worse.

Why was he showing us this?²

He held up another poster. And another. Dozens of dead, bloody fetuses.

The wife stepped forward, peering at us accusingly, and jabbed her finger against one of the posters. “That baby was fearfully and wonderfully made by God,” she yelled. “What kind of mother murders her child?”

It was suddenly clear. Unborn babies needed protection from their murderous mothers like I’d always needed protection from my abusive one.

My unplanned pregnancy at 19

I was maybe eight years old when I watched a TV movie with my parents where a girl of about twelve got pregnant. I didn’t understand how a girl as young as the sixth graders that rode my school bus could become pregnant.

“She did something bad,” my mother said without looking at me. “That’s how God is punishing her.” My mother didn’t know my brain had begun pinging with the implications of her words. My stomach roiled, and I sweated with fear that God might punish me in the same mysterious way.

My mother had raised me in a Baptist church, sent me to Catholic school, and made sure I was saved by Jesus. But she also beat me, left me on roadsides, and threatened to send me to an orphanage. When I got pregnant, she tried to bully me into having an abortion.

I refused and endured my mother’s rage. I was afraid of her, but I was more afraid of the God she’d indoctrinated me with. My pregnancy and her cruelty were all part of God’s punishment—because I had done “something bad.”

Throughout the pregnancy, I waited for harsher punishments. During the early days of my son’s life, and years later, when his sisters were born, I believed God would eventually do something unbearable and life-changing to punish me for my sins.

Now my kids are grown. They survived. I survived, too. Am I still in danger of God’s wrath?

Freedom of choice

Those posters and that word—murder—cement hardened into my sixteen-year-old psyche. I wanted to save the babies from their murderous mothers. That belief led me to work at the pregnancy center decades later.

It never occurred to me that I was the one who’d needed saving.

Maybe I had it all wrong. Maybe by risking my mother’s wrath and having the baby, I had been attempting to rescue myself from her abuse. Perhaps women like Maya need saving even more than the fetuses inside their bodies.

Over the decades, I’ve listened, nodded, and even agreed as people in evangelical churches vilified women like Maya. All the while, I failed to imagine a real, live human on the other end of the dogma.

But I see Maya now. My God, do I see her.

I feel her distress in my own body. I know in my gut it’s wrong and coercive to try to talk her out of what she wants and needs.

My throat tightens, and I don’t know what to say. Besides, Janet is right here. So I squeeze Maya’s hand, walk her through the waiting room, and watch her walk out the door, her face tear-streaked—determined to save herself.

---

Heartfelt thanks to Paulla for sharing this story with us! 💕👏 You might be wondering what she believes now. Well, Paulla flung her fear of God out of a car window between L.A. and Phoenix in 2017. Read about that and more in her beautiful Substack.

Work hard. Be brave. Believe.

Catherine

1. Except for Paulla’s, the names of pregnancy center clients and staff have been changed.

2. Editor’s Note:  The anti-abortion movement, including (many or most) Republican politicians, portrays abortions as “late-term” murder of babies. This is a vulgar misrepresentation designed to manipulate.

Consider this. In 2015, a high-profile smear campaign against Planned Parenthood purported to show a 19-week-old aborted fetus (much like the images 16-year-old Paulla was forced to view). But it wasn’t an aborted fetus. It was the child of Alexis Fretz, whose son was born too early to survive outside the womb. She’d posted the photo online in memory of the stillborn boy she’d named Walter.

Some facts:

• 94% of abortions occur within the first 13 weeks, 81% at nine weeks or earlier when the fetus is the size of a green olive.

• So-called “heartbeat” bills, like Georgia’s six-week ban, are deadly for women, and the term is inaccurate.

• An embryo has no beating heart at six weeks, only spontaneous electrical activity among neurons. The American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology confirms that a heartbeat cannot occur this early because the heart’s chambers have not yet formed.