ARTICLES

Young People on Life

HOW DIFFERENT ABORTION IS FOR THEM

By Greg Lay

Stephanie Rice is a 21-year-old junior at UC Irvine where she studies general social science in the hope of teaching. She went to El Capitan High School in Lakeside and attends Our Lady of Perpetual Help. She got involved with the pro-life movement her freshman year at UCI when she went to a Human Life International conference. She posts information on a bulletin board at her sorority house. She has prayed outside of a few clinics, donated clothes to pregnancy centers, and linked herself to the Life Chain.

She was in eighth grade when her sister had an abortion. "My sister told me that she was pregnant and was in a bad situation. She told me what she was going to do it but I didn't know what that meant. My mother and father were so sad. "I thought, 'I never said anything and I could have stopped it,' 'If only I had been more educated,' and I'm in eighth grade so what do I know about this.... She can never believe that we forgave her, that we loved her unconditionally."

A very close friend had an abortion. This was after Rice was active her first year at UCI. "We had this discussion, she was pro-choice and I told her straight out that I was pro-life. Then she went that week and had an abortion. If I would have known that she was pregnant there could have been so much more that I could have said or I could have been more supportive."

"I think one of the hardest things is to be friends with these people without offending them and not settling for agreeing to disagree because it's kind of a cop-out. It's hard to say, 'Well, she's pro-choice and I'm pro-life, but we have a great time together.' But they're my friends, I want them to know what's right.."

I asked her how young people react differently in fighting abortion than older people. She observed, "Nowadays abortion is so much more prevalent. So maybe for people my age it's more in your face and you have to make a decision and make a stand on it. You're pro-life or your pro-choice. Maybe for older people they didn't have to deal with that and also maybe, like my mom now, she's always been pro-life but it wasn't until the last five or six years that she actually talked about it."


Mary Ann Carr is a 22-year-old teacher's aide at St. Mary's (Escondido) who volunteers at Birth Choice every Wednesday. She first learned about abortion in eighth grade when Dr. Arthur Stehly came to St. Mary's and explained fetal development and abortion procedures. One of her best friends had an abortion when Carr was 16. They had been talking and arguing about it for awhile before the friend told her. Carr gave her some information about it, and, crying, the friend said that she wished that someone would have told her about it before.

Explaining how she would convince people who are not religious Carr says,"I would show that murder is illegal and that abortion should be too because it's the taking of an innocent life and mention how scientists copped out in Roe v. Wade saying it was a matter for theologians and the clergy. Now we are learning more and more every year about the baby's viability in the womb.

"Another thing that bothers me is that there are a lot of Catholics and some intelligent ones who think that it's the moral thing to use birth control. We need to talk about abortion and birth control in the Church, because in my experience these girls that come in pregnant have been on birth control. Our Church has to take a definite position on it. It's not put in a positive light but it's something very positive, it's not like the Church is being authoritarian and telling people what to do. We talk about our problem with vocations but that's kind of small compared to contraception."


Brigitte Berry is 15-year-old tenth grader at Serra High School. She lives in Tierrasanta and belongs to the youth group at Guardian Angels.

When she was a child she didn't hear much about abortion. "I don't know if it was because it wasn't publicized as much or if I didn't hear about it. When I did hear about what it was it was a shock to because I couldn't understand how people could think that way. I didn't understand it. It was a big thing, but you hear about other things like using drugs and homicide. It didn't soak in, I didn't want to know much about it at first. But once I started going to the youth group about a year and a half ago at the beginning of eighth grade they talked about it a lot and in my confirmation class they have discussions about it, lectures and videos."

She thinks that as a teenager it's harder to make converts because, "When you're a teenager people with opposite opinions are hitting you in the face all over the place and it's hard to keep your own opinions sometimes. I would tell people the facts about it, the biological facts about everything known about it, the color of the hair, the color of the eyes, all the genetics and everything. It's already a person, all it needs to do is develop."

"My best friend since fifth grade, she's sixteen and five and a half months pregnant right now, and lives in Washington at the moment. That was a scary situation for me. She's not Catholic and although she is pro-life, people sometimes change their minds once it becomes a part of their life. So I did talk to her about it. Her mom, her boyfriend, and most of her friends were trying to get her to have an abortion, but I told her it's her choice not theirs, it's not going to affect their lives. I knew inside she didn't want to and I backed her up and helped her out. Now she's going to have the baby."

Of a classroom at school debate she explains, "I didn't actually do the debate myself because I had euthanasia, but a friend of mine who is not Catholic but Christian, I got her a lot of stuff from my youth group about abortion, videos, etc. Between the debate we have a period where anyone in the classroom can raise questions and put the people on the spot and things that they hadn't covered I brought them up. I told everybody. They didn't know what I knew about it. They came back with remarks that it's a woman's choice for her body. Then I told them it's not her body it's a human being."

Asked what would life be like in jail if you were arrested for your activism, Berry thought, "At first I would probably be thinking 'What have I got myself into,' but once I got to thinking about it I would realize that I was doing it for the unborn babies, sort of making a sacrifice. I'd go through with it, stay put with my ideas. No matter what they put me through I wouldn't change because that's my opinion and I still think it's wrong."


Andre Cooley is a 16-year-old 5'10" 220-pound nose tackle and defensive end on the St. Augustine High School varsity football team. He's only a sophomore. He used to surf a couple of years ago. He's an only child living with his grandparents in San Diego, and his mom lives in Indiana. He describes himself that way although he has two younger half-brothers who live in Indiana.

Cooley belongs to the Guardian Angels youth group and has participated in its pro-life activity. At school he has delivered a couple of speeches. Yet Cooley considers himself lucky to have a mouth to speak. His mother aborted two children before she gave birth to him. Cooley's grandparents with whom he has lived since infancy told him when he was in seventh grade. "When I was a little baby my mother left me in this house. My grandparents raised me from then on. I always thought it was wrong because my mother, she had aborted a couple of children before me and she could have aborted me. Because she did drugs and she was single and didn't want to raise the kids but she chose not to. I thought it's not the way to go. I've always thought that you're never going to have a perfect child. You don't have to abort it if it has problems, if it is retarded, or it has mental problems, or if a girl is raped. And no one's perfect. Adoption is the good way. Abortion is not the right way."

Cooley speaks to his mother in Indiana. He asked why she had the abortions but his mother didn't know why. Cooley guesses about his fate, "Maybe because she found out I was a boy and she already had a name for me. Maybe she wanted to keep me. Maybe she decided that she didn't want to do it this time."

Cooley read his speech to his mother over the phone. "A priest named Michael Bray, he went and bombed an abortion clinic, and he went to jail for it. I said how abortion can drive sane people insane and they can go to drastic measures to do something since it's so wrong. I put that in my speech. She said it was a good speech."

Since St. Augustine's is all-male, abortion isn't brought up in the hallways much. Last year when he was in ninth grade a class called Faith Survey included the subject. "I know some people there that are pro-life, but most of the people there are pro-choice. I showed them this one video, it's called The Hard Truth, it's gory and graphic. It showed how the baby looked after the abortion. There was one senior and a sophomore in my class that were pro-life, but the rest were pro-choice. My teacher asked them after the class, and everyone but two raised their hands that they were now pro-life." When I asked Cooley how he would try to convince someone non-religious about the evil of abortion, he told me, "I can show you the video." Cooley gave some detail about his speeches that he has given this year, "I also talked about why it's murder because it is the killing of a human. It's the same as killing another person not in the womb. And then in the beginning of my speech for an attention getter I told them to think as if they were a little baby sitting inside your mom's room looking at your little fingers and little hands, and you see a light and then you feel a grip and you scream and you're left dead to be sucked out by a vacuum. In the end I left them with this thought: Would you kill a baby? There only one thing you can cover in pro-life: murder, it's wrong."

He responds to how he would take being in jail, "I wouldn't feel bad because I did the right thing. It's nothing to feel bad about. Martin Luther King, he got arrested for doing what he believed in. I would get arrested for doing something I believe in. It increases my faith even more, I guess. You feel like you've got your point across. Nobody feels bad. It's kind of like being a martyr without killing yourself or dying. I'd feel good."


Claire Magnan is 16 years old and a senior at Horizon High School. She lives in Chula Vista and is a non-denominational Christian. She's in the middle of applying to school and likes Azusa Pacific and Point Loma Nazarene College. She's prayed outside of abortion clinics and gone to Life Chain. She has counseled girls about their pregnancies as part of her parents' work with the Pro-Life League. They run an education chapter called Life Source. They educate churches and groups about abortion.

Her introduction to pro-life came by watching a talk show. "I think it was Geraldo or Maury Povich about some teenagers who were involved with pro-life issues. They toured around America praying outside of clinics and helping people out who were trying to decide whether to have an abortion or not. They were outright in saying what they believe. It gave me a big impression. Then I saw something on the news a little while later, like a week after that. It was about Operation Rescue and I was confused about the two because I was trying to figure out what they were because I noticed them. So I asked my dad and he explained it to me. He was doing Life Chain and he was seeing if I wanted to do it. He explained abortion to me and what it was, the reality of it. From then on that's when I started. I was probably nine or ten." Her mother is a nurse and explained it to her by drawing pictures and showed her pictures of developing babies.

"It seems as though a lot of teenagers tend to get abortions and so I see it as a big reality more so than I think adults. I'm sure adults have abortions too but it's not as likely I don't think. Every couple months teenagers call me up and say, 'I'm pregnant, what do I do?'"

"It's funny how I met one of my friends. This girl was walking down my street.and she and her boyfriend were in a big argument. My dad and I were kind of standing there and they saw a bumper sticker on my dad's car like if you have a crisis pregnancy call this number. So they knew that we were helping out people with pregnancies. We didn't even know these people but two nights later she came to my house. I was the only one there. She started talking to me. She had had an abortion before. And she was four months pregnant. She was upset because she was out on the street. Now she has a seven-month-old baby. Through me showing her things like pictures. I asked her how far along she was and she said four months and I showed her a color picture of a 16- or 17-week-old baby in womb and she knew it was a girl so I showed her a picture of a girl. I told her that's pretty much what your baby would look like now and she started crying. She was saying, "Wow, that's so amazing." She told me that she had an abortion and she felt upset about it. She regretted it a lot. She was 15 years old at the time and got kicked out of her house. She told her boyfriend that she was pregnant. It was the same guy. She said that there's no way that I'd do that to this child. That's how I met that friend.

"I have a good friend, she's in eleventh grade now, and last year she got pregnant and her mom made her get an abortion. For a while she said, 'Oh no, no, I had a miscarriage,' because she knew that abortion was wrong. And finally she wrote me a letter over the summer and she said, 'I killed my baby I and feel so bad about it.' She had so much pain and guilt. She'll go through some days where she'll be fine, but then she'll come to me and say, "Claire, can you come to me, can you talk to me?", because she's had a hard day where she can't stop crying. She said that her body hurt bad after she had that abortion. Her boyfriend and she both go through this now. They see life like, 'This could've been like this and this could've been like this.' They look at my little sister, my little sister has a baby, they see her and they think, 'Oh, wow, we could have had a baby right now.'"

"When my 15 year old sister got pregnant she was all scared to tell my mom, but I went with her. Everything worked out. A lot of people are so scared, they say, 'Oh, my parents are going to kill me.' Teenagers don't see the reality of it."


Hannah Moore is 18 years old and went to Grace Christian High School, a home school. She lives in Mira Mesa, studies with the Advanced Training Institute of America, and attends Maranatha. She was vice-president for California Teens For Life. The big event for that office was going up to Sacramento to the capitol building and speaking on the anniversary of Roe v. Wade. They made a presentation for the teens and showed the video Hard Truth. See took part in a Survivors March last April in downtown at Sixth Street at Womancare Clinic and has taken part in Life Chain. Her mom has been active in pro-life for a long time and her uncle, Ted Walker, has a pro-life clinic in Israel called B'had Chaim which means Pro-Life in Hebrew.

Her mom showed her Hard Truth. She remarked after the video, "This is a problem. I saw it as a hard truth. I sat there. You're just dumb to it. You can't say anything. I didn't know what kind of people would want to kill a baby so it started to get me thinking.

"I could have 20 other neighbors my age and they're not here, because they could've been killed. There's someone who could've been my age, it could have even been my best friend if they hadn't been killed by abortion. So if I look around I can see the difference between the people that aren't there and the people that should be there."

As to how to persuade people who are non-religious she holds, "I didn't see abortion as anything that was mentioned in the Bible. It doesn't mention it by name, but God said that He hates the shedding of innocent blood. I think that seeing pictures of it made me think about it. You can't fight pictures."

I asked how she would respond to pro-choicers who might dismiss her as a sheltered homeschooler. She says, "I'm still human. It doesn't matter if you go to school or not. you're still tempted by the same things people are. But I've had some funny situations come up. Somebody thought that I'd never seen a grocery store before. They thought I was living on this farm and we grew our own food and we had our own cows. Some people think that I don't know what society thinks, I'm always at home. I've heard it a lot, 'You don't know what it's like to go through a crisis pregnancy,' 'You don't know what it's like to get kicked out by your parents because you're pregnant.' Of course I can't understand it because I've never had to face that. But I don't think that's my ministry either. I was sheltered from that for a reason. When you're talking about abortion you don't always show videos like Hard Truth, sometimes you need to show the beautiful side of it too, for example, 'This is the baby developing.'

"It's kind of like your ministry in life. I don't believe in a permissive will, I believe in a redemptive will where sometimes you have to go through things but God will call you out of that so you can minister to people who've gone through the same thing. Paul, he martyred Christians and Timothy who had been raised on a Christian home by his mother and grandmother. Maybe you would say he was sheltered, that he was more of a tender Christian, but I think both of their ministries were important. I don't think Paul's was more important. I think Paul had a stronger ministry, because he was able to relate to more people. But Timothy's ministry was also important. He had to minister to some people. Some people say, 'I don't know anyone who has had an abortion.' So that's where I would be able to talk to them."

When I asked her how she would explain abortion to her children if it became illegal she remarked, "That would be hard. The past of America is not a pretty history. I still think that there would be abortions going on. It was John Adams who said, 'Good Laws don't make good men.'


Dustin Nochta is 18 years old and goes to San Diego State University as an undeclared major but is thinking about studying psychology. He thinks he'd like to be a family counselor. He went to high school at St. Augustine, graduated last year. He lives in Santee. Of his pro-life activity, "I've done the basic sidewalk counseling, you know, holding the sign, praying the rosary with my church, and I've attended a couple of rallies. That's about the extent, with my lifestyle, with work and everything." He has attended the Guardian Angels youth group since 1992.

I asked him how he first learned about abortion. He says, "Well, the first time I had a youth group meeting that was about abortion, we saw some videos, and I broke down and cried. The whole youth group was crying, I mean, we were a pretty strong group and everything, and we came to the realization that this is something very terrible, that we're destroying our own children. When I first heard about it, I heard the same old stuff that everybody hears in the media, like it's a woman's choice, and all this stuff. I asked my parents to begin with. What do they mean, a woman's choice? And they kind of went into, you know, it's something that's an evil thing, and it's not to be messed with. And that was about the extent of it until I started to become a teenager, that I knew, I didn't even know what it was." His parents were queasy when he became active in pro-life. He explains, "The way the media portrays pro-lifers as being so violent, someone would come by and be violent towards us. So my parents told me, 'You're going to do what you're going to do, I can't stop you.' But they weren't happy about me doing it."

"A lot of times I've had pro-choice people, in cars and whatnot, flip you off and one of them jumped up on the sidewalk in his jeep one time and about ran us over." Asked what he says when he counsels against abortion Nochta replied. "Well, I go by a scientific method, that what they call a little blob of tissue is a living human, and I've gotten into this debate several times, that little tissue is not some kind of a cyst, or tumor, it's not going to become a chicken or something, it's got human chromosomes, and human cells, it's a human baby. Completely leaving religion out of it, it's hard for me, but I can do it. I basically tell them, I stress that at certain points of development, this child is moving, thinking, sucking his thumb, sleeping, his heart is beating, he's got brain activity, all the scientific stuff that I've read in different literature and things. But it gets hard for me not to bring religion into it sometimes, because it's tied into what I believe. Because some people, they'll say, 'Well, yeah, it's a human, but it doesn't feel anything, and it doesn't matter if it's a human if it's that small.' And it's kind of hard to argue against that without bringing some kind of morality into it, to say, 'If it's a human, it's wrong to kill it.'"

At UCSD Nochta publicly voices his stand against abortion. "They'll get violent with you, and yell and scream at you, and get in your face, about, 'This is my choice, and it's none of your g-d- business.' And all I can do as a Christian is stand there and be as calm as I can, and try and explain to them that even if you're not religious, this is a baby. You're killing your own kind. In nature, animals do not even kill their own kind. From a scientific standpoint, it's not right."

I asked Nochta how he would defend himself against the charge that he's male and doesn't understand a woman's dilemma. "Well, I might be a male, but I was a human baby at one time, and, being a male, I am a part of the human race. I care more about respect for women than a lot of pro-choice people do. The pro-choice attitude as a whole, I feel, is disrespectful to women. It goes to show those people that got them pregnant in the first place, or that they had got pregnant with in the first place, if those people are pushing them to have an abortion, all that shows is that that man doesn't respect that woman for who she is. He respects her for what he can get from her. And if that entails having a child because he had sex with some woman, then he knows he can continue having sex at her expense. It doesn't cost him anything to get an abortion, whereas it would cost him a lifetime of commitment and love to actually be a father."

"This one time, this woman came in with her boyfriend, and her boyfriend was yelling and screaming at us, 'I don't want to hear it,' and, 'She's having an abortion, and that's that, because we can't afford this baby, and I can't stand to have to do this,' and he couldn't take the responsibility. And we sat down with both of them and talked to them for quite a while, and they ended up going to one of the churches that was with us. They ended up going to that church. They kept the baby, and they got a little bit of assistance from the church.The husband ended up getting a job, and they got married."

"Our youth leader at the time, Matt Pinto, he's very good at speaking. He went up to this one woman, and he was talking to her, and she was describing every single situation that this baby was going to be causing for her, and in the end, he asked her, 'If none of this stuff would happen to you, would you like to have a child? Would you like to have a son or daughter?' And she said, 'Yes, but I can't do it right now.' He said something to her, I can't remember the exact words, but it was very inspirational, obviously, to her. This whole time, she was preaching about how she couldn't have this baby. He said something like, 'God will provide for you, and all you have to do is seek out the help.' This whole time she was very adamant, she wasn't crying or anything, she seemed angry. And all of a sudden, she got tears in her eyes, and she started crying, and she told him, 'I can't do this.' And she ended up going home without having the abortion."

Noting the sparsity of triumph that goes with sidewalk counseling Nochta complains, "That's what makes it so hard to go up and talk to people, is that you're already facing rejection. And you have to be a fairly strong person to go out there and picket in the first place. And you have to be even stronger to actually go up and speak with people. Some teenage girls that had come in one time about my age. They were there with their mothers, and their mothers were trying to convince them to have an abortion. I pulled out the literature about teenage girls that had had abortions and grown up to have a lot of problems, and they never forgot that baby. And a couple of times, the teenage girls would tell me, 'That's what I'm afraid of, even though I can't support this baby on my own, that I'm going to be living with this for the rest of my life.' I've only got one girl to actually not have an abortion. But I've spoken to probably about five or six young girls while I was picketing."