“For a long time, I struggled with the morality of abortion. I was pro-life. Not to the extent of protesting and saying abortion needs to be banned—I just found the whole concept very upsetting. Part of it was my faith, but it was also that I had a hard time getting pregnant. I thought: How nice for you—you get pregnant easily and you don’t even want the baby.
“My own reproductive history has been totally out of my control. I got pregnant when I was 40, after I’d had four miscarriages and two children. I already had my life. I was working part-time, my older boys were in school—everything was all structured. Then I found out I was pregnant and I thought, Oh, my gosh, I didn’t plan this, this is not what I want. I didn’t have an abortion—I can think of very few circumstances under which I would have ever had an abortion—but I recognized that it was my choice. That was a turning point in my attitude.
“Twenty-five years later, I saw this Facebook ad for clinic escort training, and I thought, oh, I guess patients do need escorts to get past those people blocking the sidewalk—the people out there with their signs, shouting at passersby. But on my first day, I was so shocked at the things they were saying—you know, ‘God is judging you’ and the blood of those babies is on our hands as escorts because we help murder them. I’m a Christian, but I thought: This is not Christlike. If love is the bottom line in your faith, how can you treat people that way?
“I went home and really questioned myself: Am I supposed to be doing this? Is God judging me? I did some reading about when does life begin, what does Jesus think. And I feel that Jesus would put his arm around those women and walk into the clinic with them. If God knows your heart, then he knows what you’re going through and loves you because of it.
“So I kept escorting. For me, escorting is walking the walk instead of just praying about the situation without doing anything. I have family members who are appalled that I’m doing this: I mean, how can you step so far away from your faith? And I say, you know, I feel like I’m stepping further into it.”
This article appears in the September 2022 issue of Washingtonian.
