Unplanned: The Dramatic True Story of a Former Planned Parenthood Leader's Eye-Opening Journey Across the Life Line Read Online Free PDF Page A

hadn’t followed my values, and I knew it. Premarital sex, birth control, abortion—other people argued about them. I simply avoided thinking about these issues, about whether they were right or wrong. And somehow, any tensions between what I had been raised to believe and value and what I actually did, I managed to keep hidden in a box buried deep within me. A box I had so far managed to never open, never examine.
    I stepped out of the Flag Room that day without any doubt that I’d found a cause—a good cause—to fight for. I would invest myself in serving women in crisis.
    How, I wonder still, could I not have recognized the crisis in my own soul?

Chapter Three
The Power of a Secret
    Never trust a decision you don’t want your mother to know about. How’s that for a brilliant insight? These days I can laugh at how obviously true that’s been in my life. But the road that finally led me to this wisdom is paved with regret, pain, brokenness, shame, and even blood on my hands.
    But I never saw it coming. There was much I didn’t see.
    I left campus the day of the volunteer fair as a proud champion of women in crisis, their protector against would-be controllers who wanted to rob them of the right to safe medical services and deny them access to education on how to manage their reproductive decisions. I would be their guardian against back-alley butchers; sexually transmitted diseases; unknown cancers lurking in their bodies, undetected for lack of annual exams; and insult-throwing agitators who wanted to humiliate and shame them.
    So why didn’t I call Mom and tell her my good news?
    Mom and Dad lived in Rockdale, about forty-five minutes from Texas A&M. For the most part, I’d had a great relationship with them and considered myself lucky to have such a close family. Until I left for college, we had always attended church together. I’d been active in church youth group, had been a camp counselor, and always had been a good student—an overachiever in many ways. I’d been vice president of student council, a yearbook editor, active in choir and drama, on the dance team, a member of Business Professionals of America and the Texas Association of Future Educators, and in the top 10 percent of my class. I loved being involved with people and was particularly drawn to leadership opportunities. My parents had always told me they were proud of me and were supportive of me in every way.
    At A&M, I called home almost every day just to stay in touch and fill them in on my comings and goings—newsy chats about life, school, and friends. I did the same the day after the fair. I just didn’t happen to mention my new decision to become a Planned Parenthood volunteer. It’s not that I intended to keep it secret, I told myself—more that I didn’t want to worry them, because I didn’t think they would be able to understand how the work I would be doing wasn’t going to promote abortion, but lessen it. I’ll wait until I’ve been doing it a little while, I reasoned , so I can give them examples of the good I’m doing there, how I’m helping women.
    It wasn’t the first secret I’d kept from them.
    Oddly, at the time, I didn’t consciously connect this new secret with the old one I still kept. That other secret was about a year old, buried deep, so deep I never let it rise to conscious thought. I lived as if it had never happened, as if it were just a long-ago, unimportant medical appointment that had come and gone without a trace or consequence. It wasn’t that I had strong emotions of pain that I was trying to bury. It wasn’t festering or lurking or weighing on me. In fact, I had no emotions at all about it. None. Zip. It was simply a fact—private, personal, done, and behind me. Or so I thought.
    “I’m not really sure how I feel about abortion,” I’d told Jill in the Flag Room. Truer words were never spoken. I didn’t have a clue how I felt about abortion, and as for what I thought about it—well, I