Women Deserve Better

Karen Shablin, a former member of the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League (NARAL) and now Pro-Life Feminist, recently spoke at Princeton University. She spoke of her personal experience with abortion and why she's now pro-life:

"My decision to have an abortion in my 20s, in retrospect, was an effort to protect everything I had worked for," she said, adding that now she "oppose[s] abortion with every thread of my being."

Looking back, Shablin said, she thinks she underestimated her own strength and the support that would have been available to her had she chosen to carry her pregnancy to term.

Her transformation into an opponent of abortion, Shablin said, came when she was working as Medicaid director for the state of New Jersey. During that time, the state implemented a family cap policy, which denied additional benefits or reduced the cash grant to families who had children while on welfare. The policy strove to dissuade people from expanding their families without the means to support more children.

But since New Jersey was also publicly financing abortions, Shablin said, many women terminated their pregnancies in order to avoid losing their benefits. When she saw the first family cap report, she was "heartbroken" to see that some women had had four abortions in a 12-month period.

"Like many, I believed that women might choose abortion after [an unplanned pregnancy], but I didn't believe that women would have multiple abortions," she said.