From Pro-Life to Pro Choice — How Becoming a Nurse Changed My Views on Abortion
Carrie Denny, 41, was raised in a small, conservative town in Tennessee, and she always considered herself pro-life. She dreamed of becoming a nurse but worked in the corporate world until she was laid off in 2011. That’s when she decided to pursue her passion. She graduated from Eastern Tennessee State University with a degree in nursing and began working full-time on the orthopedic surgical floor, with the goal of moving to labor and delivery. However, a few months into the job, she was diagnosed with cancer and has spent most of the past two years in treatment. She recently began volunteering at a private nursing facility, where she eventually plans to work full-time. A conversation with an instructor in nursing school made Denny completely rethink her views on abortion.
I was born and raised in this little town in Johnson City, Tennessee. I am an only child. My dad had a successful career as an attorney, and my mom was a homemaker. I remember saying, “When I grow up, I want to be a secretary.” And when I think of that now, I just cringe. My parents are very, very traditional in what they think of as gender roles. We were always compared to the Cleavers from Leave It to Beaver. We were a close-knit family, wholesome I guess. You go to Sunday school and church every week, and that’s what you do here in the South. You don’t have sex before you get married, homosexuality is wrong, abortion is murder, friends are good, God is great. That was normal. I didn’t know I was sheltered. I never questioned it, because that was all I had really been exposed to. It took me moving four hours away when I first went to college to even know that there were people who even thought differently.I believe it was Thanksgiving break of our freshman year of college [when my friend] told me she thought she was pregnant. We went to the store and got a pregnancy test, and she took it in the bathroom, and when it turned positive, she panicked. She didn’t know what she was going to do. And I remember telling her how I would support her and she needed to have the baby and you can’t abort this baby because it’s a life. I was very, very, very pro-life at that point. When she finally told her parents a couple days later, it was not up for discussion. She would have an abortion.
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I was talking to one of my nurse friends and I said, “I feel like I’m almost the third argument for abortion.” You have pro-life, you have pro-choice, and you have me, who believes that abortion should be legal for the women to make their own decisions but not routinely used for birth control. It’s kind of hard to walk that line. I don’t believe in late-term abortion. But I do think that if a woman knows she cannot physically, financially, emotionally take care of the child, then she absolutely has a right to terminate that pregnancy, and who are we to judge her? If somebody is going to be responsible enough to say I am not going to tax the system anymore and I can terminate this pregnancy, I think that’s a brave choice and we should support that.
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