Highlight: Choice and the abortion industry

What goes on behind the scenes at abortion facilities? Jewels Green paints a picture much less benign than what we may be led to believe. Her story is one of coercion into a life of offering only one choice to women. After having an abortion herself, Jewels felt she had to make sense of it.

“I think I was trying to justify what I had gone through; and essentially, if I chose to surround myself with people who thought abortion was okay, maybe I’d believe that, too, someday.

“So, within a couple of weeks of leaving the hospital, I’m marching in Washington, D.C. in support of a woman’s right to choose an abortion. I started volunteering as an escort at a first trimester abortion clinic that summer, right after my abortion and suicide attempt, and by the end of the year, I was hired full-time.”

Welcomed quickly into the industry, Jewels recalls the real feelings she wrestled with, and the decision she made as a result.

“When I look back, I was hoping that maybe I could help people from the inside. I know that, deep down, I never stopped missing my baby; I never stopped kicking myself for not being strong enough to save him, for not being strong enough to save myself. I almost saw it as a type of penance: ‘okay, I’m going to work in the abortion industry, and I’m going to try to help people for real.’

Jewels remembers believing that she was doing good and helping women.

“Being inside the walls where death is a daily occurrence is not something that’s easy to describe to folks who are lifelong pro-lifers. We truly believed that we were offering a necessary, much-maligned service to these women. I bought that line, hook, line, and sinker.

“It was really hard with those blinders on to even see that we weren’t offering any other choice than death.”

As a pre-abortion counselor, Jewels says she wasn’t equipped to provide an alternative choice.

“If a woman came to the women’s center where I worked and said to me, when I was a pre-abortion counselor, ‘I‘m thinking about adoption; I don’t know if I want to be here – can you tell me about adoption?’ I wasn’t able to. We weren’t trained to describe the difference between open and closed adoption or kinship care or any of those things.

Choice really was a euphemism. And, as you know, it still is.”

Jewels now spends her time speaking against the lie that abortion helps women. She writes to tell the real story of the pain it inflicts, and to let women know that they really do have a choice that brings hope: they can choose life.


Jewels Green is a pro-life speaker and author of . Jewels is also a featured contributor to .

Choice and the abortion industry highlight