“If I had one person to stand by me, I would have kept the baby.”

Allen Macartney
Special to Spur Ottawa

Frederica Mathewes-Green was once a strong supporter of abortion. In the 1970s, her car bumper proclaimed, “Don’t labour under a misconception. Legalize abortion.” On January 18, Mathewes-Green will address a pro-life group in Ottawa, via video link, to talk about how to help women facing crisis pregnancies.

What changed Mathewes-Green’s mind was something totally unexpected: a dramatic faith conversion to Jesus. During a youthful hitchhiking trip around Europe she ventured into an Irish church and encountered Christ face to face.

“It was a galvanizing experience,” she says.

A 1976 article in Esquire Magazine entitled, “What I Saw at the Abortion,” helped focus her passion to protect the preborn. The eye-witness article described a 19-week abortion, where a doctor injected prostaglandin into the amniotic fluid of a pregnant woman’s abdomen, but the baby fought for its life.

Violence is a cornerstone of abortion.

“The article writer (also a doctor) said he could see the syringe moving, tugged back and forth by the dying child,” says Frederica Mathewes-Green. “The abortion issue is the single greatest human rights justice issue of our age. It’s the worst type of discrimination because it involves killing someone else, a helpless baby.”

Violence is a cornerstone of abortion, she says.

About 70 children are killed in automobile accidents each year in Canada. But approximately 100,000 children are killed annually by abortion. Since 1969 (the year Pierre Elliot Trudeau legalized abortion in Canada) the death toll has reached over 3 million children.

The upcoming videoconference will discuss Mathewes-Green’s research project, Real Choices (the title of her first book). During the research she travelled around the United States asking post-abortive women why they had an abortion. The overwhelming reason (88 percent of cases) sited advice or pressure from a loved one—often the child’s father or the woman’s own mother.

“Get the person talking to find out what pro-choice arguments seem convincing to them.”

“When I asked what was the one thing someone could have done to help, they said, ‘If I had one person to stand by me, I would have kept the baby—a friend, an arm to lean on, a shoulder to cry on.’” But no one was there.

Christians can talk effectively about this issue by first listening, says Mathewes-Green.

“Get the person talking to find out what pro-choice arguments seem convincing to them. It can be anything: a faulty idea about overpopulation, mistaken belief that most abortions are done for extreme cases like rape, or even racist beliefs that poor or non-white women should stop having babies.”

Listen, find the reason, then talk gently to that issue. Anything else seems to waste time. Mathewes-Green tries to provide pregnant women with alternatives to abortion that are practical, realistic, and life-affirming.

She adds that abortion has other hidden consequences, whether you believe in God or not.

“It wounds the soul and damages our commitments to each other.”

Abortion supporters know they don’t have a factual, logical argument, or even one they can make from a humanistic case. So, often they turn to abuse and insults, says Mathewes-Green. The discouraging thing: this tactic is often successful. It shuts us up.

She emphasizes that abortion does not liberate or empower women.

“Abortion is a miserable, devastating experience for women. But most of all, abortion kills an innocent child.”