Alina Clough is a writer at Evie magazine which focuses on the needs of women. For years she spoke out about a woman's right to an abortion.
"I just thought for years that it was the compassionate thing to do," Clough told CBN News. "I had bought into a lot of lies, specifically in college. I never really centered the unborn in the conversation."
As a conservative commentator and Christian, Clough said her views on abortion didn't match those of her friends in the pro-life community.
A recent conversation helped open her eyes that abortion was wrong.
"It was really just her sitting there breaking down one by one all of the misinformation that I had learned and thinking that most women just happily want abortions and realizing that a lot of women are pressured into it," Clough explained. "By the end of that conversation, that wasn't something that I could stand with, that the unborn truly was life and that it was worth treating that way."
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While abortion advocates often paint pro-lifers as angry or lacking compassion Clough pushed back in a recent op-ed for the Washington Examiner called "Kindness Won Me Over to the Pro-life Movement".
"A lot of the conversation around pro-lifers gets focused on the negative, whereas what I view them as, and certainly the reason that they won me over despite all of the misinformation I'd bought into, was truly their warmth and their kindness," she said.
Clough says she also saw that kindness displayed during her first time at the annual March for Life in Washington, DC.
"It was so powerful," she said. "They're advocating for the end to things like abortion of course, but they really are celebrating how much they love and value life. It feels different to be in a crowd like that where people are singing hymns and they're just truly celebrating and recognizing how much work there still is to do."
Clough also admits the sad reality that abortion is being promoted as empowerment for women.
"I really wish that we would just stop seeing babies as such an obstacle and recognize that there's a better way out. I don't think that we have to pit birth and life against all of these other priorities, and I think it's really sad that that's where the politics have ended up," said Clough.
It is a political idea she now regrets once sharing.
"I'm grateful that God is a forgiving God. I'm very grateful that other believers have held my hand and been very patient with me. But it does hurt to know that a lot of the things that I said before defending abortion in the name of God and that I gave other people perhaps justifications for continuing those beliefs," Clough said.
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