April 2022 Newsletter - Spring Road Trips!

I'm a bit behind on posting my newsletters on my blog.

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It’s a good thing I love meeting strangers, talking about abortion, and traveling, because I’ve been doing a lot of all that recently (hence the late letter)!  Every spring and fall, Created Equal takes Road Trips for Life (RTFL), traveling to different areas in the country to hit up college campuses and dialogue with students about abortion.  Since I’m fresh (to CE) as a tomato out o’ your mama’s garden, I was on three out of four of this Spring’s RTFLs, three weeks in a row!

During the road trips, we went to schools in eight states in the northeastern US.  At Indiana State University, I had a short conversation with a student named Gladys.  After a bit, I asked her if she would say she’s against abortion now, and she said, “I would be in the middle now.  ‘Cause at first I was all the way there, like, it’s your choice, but now that you’ve explained it like that, I’m in the middle.  It’s giving me something to think about.”

A bit later at the same school, I spoke to Julia, a girl who initially was for abortion, but after talking about it a bit, she started to really think about it differently.  At one point in our conversation, she turned and looked around at our signs and said, “Okay I’m like against it, after seeing these pictures,” and by the end of the conversation, she told me, “Thank you for changing my mind!”

One of the things I go back to repeatedly in these conversations is S.L.E.D., which stands for Size, Level of development, Environment, and Degree of dependency.  These are the four things people use to say preborn children are so different from us that it’s okay to kill them; but in fact, we all differ from each other in these ways, yet we don’t differ in value, right?  Our humanity is the only thing we all have in common, so it is the only thing from which we can get our equality, which means it must be applied to preborn humans as well.

Last week on our Maryland trip, we had two days of crazy, angry crowds that happily waved us off campus as we left.  “F” is every protester’s favorite word and we saw an abundance of their favorite finger too.

By now most of you have probably heard the big news about a draft of the decision about Roe v. Wade being leaked.  I have reason to believe this will be the official decision: Roe will be overturned, and turned back to the states!  Our work is nowhere near done, but this is a big, surreal moment in history!

From the frontlines of the battle for equality,

Maggie