Warning, long post

Hey all, today I was in charge of a pro-life booth at our local fair and most of my shift was very good, talking to nice people, giving out balloons to kids, etc. But only 10 minutes into my shift a woman came up to the table and asked to look at one of the sheets with abortion stats that we had laying there. She looked at it for a while and eventually started asking questions like, “What is abortion defined as? What if there is a medical reason, like there is something genetically wrong with it?” I gave her my best definitions, abortion was the ending of a pregnancy by killing the child inside the womb (remember that word inside), and if an ectopic pregnancy were to happen, that would not be considered an abortion by removing it since the baby has no chance of surviving, being in the Fallopian tube could kill the mother, and transplanting the baby into the uterus is not possible (I still don’t like ectopic babies lives being ended but truly there is no chance of survival, and these are very, very rare anyway).

She then asked me why “medical reasons/genetic deficiencies” wasn’t listed as one of the reasons women get abortions and I said, “Because less than even 1% of abortions are done for those reasons, it’s even less than the reason for rape. Roughly 99% of abortions are for elective reasons.” She knew this was true since she just looked at the paper that stated all these stats, but she just shook her head and said, “No, no, absolutely not, that’s not true, it’s way more.” And before I could ask her why she said, “So, I’ve had an abortion,” (and I thought, oh boy, here we go,) “and it just bothers me that you people aren’t putting out the right information about people like me that have had one because my baby was genetically deficient.”

I asked her all sorts of questions like how was that determined, did she get a second doctors’ opinion, was the abortion done at a hospital or Planned Parenthood, what was “wrong” with the baby that it needed its life ended? She said the baby had part of its heart missing, all the doctors said it would die, they pushed her into ending the pregnancy, and it was done at a hospital. Here’s the weird part though, remember how I said abortions are done inside the uterus? And she agreed with that definition. Well, her “abortion” went like this: she was induced into labor (I never got to ask her how far along the pregnancy was but I imagine it was at least 4-5 months to induce labor), they removed the baby from the womb, cut the umbilical cord, and just let it die outside of her womb. Now, call me crazy, but that is not an actual abortion. Yes, the baby died, and the intent was to let it die, but it was outside the womb and not even attached to the mother. (This could have even been considered infanticide.) I pointed this out to her and she got really mad saying, “No, no, I signed the papers and it said it was an abortion.” (How disgusting that you need to sign the papers for your own baby’s death, gross.)

She got very upset about the whole thing and started crying. Clearly this woman was not over this traumatic experience and for some reason she thought our pro-life booth was antagonizing her for her “choice.” Seems pretty obvious she had little choice in this decision, since doctors will always push abortion first over any other treatment that might save the baby.

Once she started really grilling me and pushing me on certain things I started to panic. I’m not very good at public speaking or in-person debates (online debates and written arguments are fine) so my mind kind of froze and my mouth went dry and I couldn’t speak until I had some water to drink. She probably thought she’d cornered me because I had to pause for a moment to gather my thoughts. Needless to say I’m not very happy with how that discussion/debate turned out.

To be honest I think she did choose the wrong thing by removing the baby and then letting it die before its time.

The truly pro-life thing to do would be to let the baby keep gestating for as long as possible. This might result in a miscarriage eventually down the line because of the genetic deficiencies, but if so, then that is a natural death, not forced, and you let the baby live for as long as possible. But if the baby makes it to birth, surgery is possible, and I’ve read many stories about babies born with half of their brains or half of their hearts that survive well past 10 years old. Survival IS possible for these babies if they are just given a chance. And to be honest, this lady seemed like the type to only want “perfect” babies that don’t need any extra medical interventions to keep them alive. Although I’m sure she was really pressured into it, it still feels like she took the easy way out, and I bet she didn’t even look anywhere for children's hospitals that do prenatal or perinatal heart surgeries. Which is weird because she cried about how much she “wanted” this baby but apparently she didn’t want it enough to look at every option available, or to at least give birth to it normally, spend as much time with it as possible, and let it pass on its own.

After her crying for a while and me trying to reason with her, to no avail, she eventually left and her mother came up after and was very nice. She said, “I’m sorry about that, it was just a very stressful time for her. And if it had been up to me I would have made her keep the baby for as long as possible, I didn’t agree with the abortion.” I wish her mother would have convinced her to not kill her grandchild. I shook hands with her mother and told her thank you for talking with us.

So I know this is long, but I want to know what you guys think. Was there something I could do better with situations like this? Usually I encounter the bratty, snotty, entitled pro-aborties who just want abortion to keep their sex lives free, so this one threw me off guard. I also wasn’t very prepared for quick public speaking and I tensed up and couldn’t talk. What can I do to overcome this nervousness?

TLDR; “pro-abortie” woman who was (probably) pressured into aborting her genetically deficient baby debated me, then cried, kind of made me freeze, I couldn’t make the greatest argument back, what can I do to help get over nervousness in public debates/speaking?