At first glance, Dr. Willie Parker doesn’t seem like your typical pro-choice advocate: he’s a devout Christian from the Deep South—and a Black man to boot. But it’s precisely because of those identities that he has become a powerful force in flipping the script on what a “godly” stance on abortion should be.
Dr. Parker—who used to refuse to perform abortions and now does the procedure approximately 1,000 times a year—flips forced-birther rhetoric upside down by showing how being pro-choice is the moral stance around abortion access. In an interview with Jezebel, he explains (emphasis mine):
I believe that men and women are equal in their agency. If women have moral agency and autonomy, that means that all processes that occur in their body should be governed only by that woman’s decision-making. So what that means is that people should not be able to have laws that will allow them to be preoccupied with the well-being of a fetus that a woman’s carrying than they are with the woman. You can’t care more about the fetus that a woman’s carrying than you do about the woman who’s carrying it.
If you fancy that that fetus has rights, and you call that fetus a person and a baby, I don’t agree with that from a scientific or even from a religious standpoint. But we can debate about whether or not a fetus is a person. But there’s no question that a woman is a person. And so the question is: At what point is a woman not a person?
The doctor nails the problem with the Republican obsession with restricting abortion access—it legislates bodily autonomy away from women and thus implies that women are not complete, competent human beings.
Anti-choice Christians obsessed with legislating control over other women’s bodies love to say that they’re taking the high moral ground. But anyone familiar with the anti-choice movement’s history of anti-abortion violence, their continued rejection of facts, and their racist history (and present) knows that truth, justice, and compassion are the last things on their minds. As Parker said (emphasis mine):
I think we live in society where we are tolerating injustice on the basis of gender and sex and I think that injustice is immoral, and so unless we secure the liberties for women, then we live in an unjust society. And that makes it an immoral one. So in order to restore that morality, we have to ensure that women have the same rights and privileges to self-governance that men have.
In his new memoir, Life’s Work: A Moral Argument For Choice, Parker addresses these issues and more. Not only does he dedicate a chapter to explaining how an abortion actually happens, he shares his personal journey from being devout Christian who refused to perform abortions to becoming one of the top abortion providers in the country. With the staunchly anti-choice Mike Pence as our VP and other GOP lawmakers controlling so much of our government, Dr. Parker’s book couldn’t come at a better time.