March for Life

according to your abilities, situation, and opportunities.  Mother Jones tells one man's story, though sometimes the pro-choice milieu of the magazine shines through.  Excerpts follow:

...IN HINDSIGHT, it's not hard to see how Cassidy's adoration of motherhood would take him from adoption and surrogacy to abortion, but for years he didn't view it that way. "This may sound very thoughtless," Cassidy told me when I first met him four years ago, "but there was a point in time when I didn't think at all about abortion or what abortion did to women." He paused, and then confessed. "And so I was all for it."

That began to change in 1990, when a couple came to him after their child was born with Down syndrome. The doctor had not done an amniocentesis, which might have diagnosed the condition, and they wanted to sue for "wrongful birth"—claiming they would have aborted had they known. Cassidy declined the case. "In this particular instance I was thinking, 'What would it be like for me and for this little girl if I stood in the well of a courtroom and argued to a jury that they had to give lots of money to her mom and dad because they didn't get a chance to kill her?'" he says. "That case forced me to ask the question, how did the law get this cruel?...It all led back to Roe v. Wade."

He also started paying attention to the legal discrepancies between adoption and abortion. What impressed him, he told me, was that a woman thinking about giving away her baby can only terminate the mother-child relationship after the state helps ensure she's making the right decision: In many states, she must wait until after birth to relinquish the child and must be offered counseling. "Those [maternal] rights are treated with the most profound respect," Cassidy says, but "in the context of abortion, there is no respect.... My first question that I had for everybody—I'm talking about the courts, about people going into the courts claiming they represent the rights of women, about the pro-life community, the churches who like to talk about this issue—where is their discussion and defense of the mother, the real rights of the mother?"

He began reaching out, speaking with women about their abortion experiences and visiting crisis pregnancy centers (PDF), which were opening around the country to advise women to carry their pregnancies to term. "It was just me, wanting to be educated," Cassidy says...

He teamed up with a fellow lawyer named Allan Parker—president of the conservative Texas-based Justice Foundation—to create Operation Outcry, a project that has solicited some 2,000 court-admissible declarations to date from women describing how abortion has destroyed their lives. The effort also received help from Norma McCorvey and Sandra Cano, lead plaintiffs in the two Supreme Court cases—Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton—that led to legalized abortion. The women filed briefs in Santa Marie arguing that legalizing abortion has harmed women, and urging that their own cases be overturned...

Unlike most pro-lifers, who tended to focus on preserving unborn life, Cassidy was arguing for the preservation of women's sanity. He had arranged for dramatic testimony from some of the women whose stories he'd been collecting. There was the rape victim who said she'd had an abortion at the urging of family and friends, and who now felt that the procedure was like a second rape, far worse than the first. Another woman spoke of attempting suicide because she felt guilty about her abortion. (Cassidy recalls her leaning over the table to show legislators the scars where she'd sliced her arms—one lawmaker had to leave the room to compose himself.) He also brought in fetal development experts and pro-life mental-health researchers to attest to abortion's psychological hazards and the status of the fertilized egg as a complete human being. When Cassidy took the floor, he spoke of the women who had sought his assistance with adoption cases, and about returning the babies to their biological mothers. He spoke of the other women, too, explaining that "I can't get the babies back for them because the people who violated their rights killed the babies..."

...pro-life legislators were impressed by the gut-wrenching testimony Cassidy had arranged. In 2005, they created a task force to study abortion's harmful effects. Cassidy was again called in to help, and the task force published a lengthy report citing the stories of his witnesses and recommending that abortion be banned. It was a huge moment for Cassidy and his allies: For the first time, sketchy findings about abortion's emotional harm to women had a state's official imprimatur. The same year, the legislators passed South Dakota's informed-consent law, which requires doctors to tell their patients "that the abortion will terminate the life of a whole, separate, unique, living human being"—language nearly identical to that which Cassidy used in Santa Marie. In 2011, the law faces a challenge in a case called Planned Parenthood v. Rounds. Arguing in its defense before the Eighth US Circuit Court of Appeals will be South Dakota's attorney general—and Cassidy himself...