I think it was 2008 when I sat down for breakfast with George Zaille. George had lost his daughter Stacy to suicide. She had been a wonderful person, a promising student, homecoming queen and a member of the soccer team. But after graduation from high school, her life suddenly took a wrong turn. She began to drink heavily and retreated into herself.

She started seeing a psychiatrist but then stopped going. Eventually she took her own life. A few weeks later, George was tidying up her room when a piece of paper fell from her bed. George opened it and read a note Stacy had written. In it she said she had an abortion and was grieving the loss of her child. This led to her alcohol abuse, depression, isolation, and eventually to her suicide.

As we were sipping our coffee, we were joined by Jewels Green. Jewels herself had an abortion at age 17. Shortly afterwards, she tried to kill herself and ended up in an adolescent psych unit. She later became an ardent abortion advocate and eventually worked for an abortion clinic. But her views changed some years later when a friend became a surrogate mother and as part of the contract agreed to abort the baby if it had Down's syndrome.

She realized that this reduces human life to a commodity and she could not accept that. Eventually she became a pro-life advocate also undergoing post-abortion healing. When I left the breakfast, Jewels was offering consolation and sympathy to George for his irreplaceable loss. I will never forget it.

My own views for many years were ardently pro-choice. After all, it is the woman’s body, and no one has a right to tell her what to do with it. Nothing should interfere with her autonomy.

I recall one day seeing Pope Saint John Paul II giving an address in front of Bill Clinton and Al Gore when Bill was president. The Pope said, “A nation will be judged by how it treats the weakest and poorest among them.” This led to enthusiastic applause. But then he said, “And who is weaker or poorer than the unborn?” This was following by silence and the shuffling of feet.

This made an impression on me, but not enough to sway me from the pro-choice views. But I became increasingly concerned about the effect of abortion on the women who participate in them.

There have been well over 60 million women in the USA who have had abortions since 1973 and about half of them were coerced. These women are particularly at risk, but all women who have had abortions have higher rates of depression, drug and alcohol abuse, suicide and other issues. Abortion makes it simpler for men to use women as sex objects with minimal consequences while objectifying the women. These factors swayed me to a pro-life view.

We live in a society where autonomy has become the highest moral value to the point that we no longer really care for each other. "Whatever floats your boat" is the legacy my generation, the baby boomers, leaves behind. But we forgot that we are all connected. As Saint Theresa of Calcutta (Mother Theresa) has said, “If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other.”

I have come to believe that love is the highest value, and love means willing the good of another, not just coexisting and leaving them to their own devices. Because of this, I can never support political positions which lead to the objectification of women to satisfy the lusts of men, which is exactly what abortion does.

There are great resources out there for women contemplating having an abortion, the Elliot Institute which has in depth research on the effects of abortion on women, and Virtue Media, which expresses these effects in powerful short videos.

There are also resources for post-abortion healing, like Rachel’s Vineyard and Project Rachel. These resources should be communicated as widely as possible. Many women are suffering from the effects of abortion. We need to extend them the love and support they need.

William V. Williams, is a physician, the Editor in Chief Emeritus of the Linacre Quarterly, the official journal of the Catholic Medical Association, and a Deacon in the Archdiocese of Philadelphia

Email address williamvwilliams@icloud.com

Image: James McNellis

Email address williamvwilliams@icloud.com