I Was Pro-Life Until a Story of Rape Changed My Mind

The girl on the left, with her bandana and hooded sweat shirt was me as a young teenager. I was outspoken on my stance for abortion. Whores should pay for spreading their legs, and I didn't give a damn about medical choice freedom.

If you look back two decades and ask those who were my close friends, you will know it wasn't a subject anyone could discuss with me because of the fire I would spit like a fucking dragon.

Then when I was seventeen years old my role model was date raped by a young man she had been seeing for a short time. The man, a twenty three year old college student had taken my sister out to dinner, and to your typical college party. Both being of legal age for alcohol they had a good time. Only a few dates into their relationship a sexual relationship was virtually nonexistent, until that night.

While the intimate details I will keep private, my sister was raped. A woman violated by a man she had placed trust into because he felt like she owed him something for being a gentleman and taking her out to dinner. (Yes, this is a factual statement from what happened!)

Like many women in America who are raped by people they know, she did not report it. In fact my sister didn't tell anyone about it for two full months. I could tell she was upset by something, and never seeing the gentleman caller around I figured it was just a break up.

I was a child when I walked into the bedroom I shared with her and discovered her crying. She then confided in me. The youngest child in the family.

This was also when she told me she had an appointment at the abortion clinic in the morning. Part of me was angry with her for even considering abortion. After all it was something I had been so against, and she knew that.

As I sat with her and listened to her. Heard the heartbreak and desperation in her voice. Her questions of what our mother would think or what people would think of her, something clicked inside me.

Looking back it was compassion turning on. She was a woman hurt. Violated and she deserved to have the right to have an abortion with all she had been through. Who was I to tell her no? It wasn't my pregnancy or my body. It wasn't my choice to make.

The foundation of everything I had believed so hard went out the window. The propaganda I had bought into, the brainwashing and the harassment of innocent women.

I felt like a sham of a feminist and I knew from that day forward I would not only work to undo all the wrong I had done in the past, but I would work to help women just like my sister. Whether it was rape or just birth control failing them. I would be there for them.

And I have been and continue to be.