Wed 8/23 @ 7-9PM
Dr. Willie Parker was raised in a Christian environment where he was taught that abortion was murder — but once he started to explore the reasons why women get abortions, he realized that it was the Christian thing to do to provide them without judgment.
And so, as an obstetrician/gynecologist, that’s what he does, serving women in Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, Pennsylvania and Illinois. He’s also become an outspoken advocate for women’s reproductive freedom, as the former Medical Director of Planned Parenthood of Metropolitan Washington D.C., chairman of the board of Physicians for Reproductive Health and now author of the new book Life’s Work: A Moral Argument for Choice.
His book takes apart the “Christian” myths about abortion and relates how his initial belief that abortion was always wrong came to be moderated by his exposure to real women facing real-life situations. As he writes of the ramped-up assault on women’s rights in the George W. Bush era, “The living, breathing women who carried those fetuses in utero were cast as less than fully human — either as criminals, on the one hand, or mentally incompetent on the other — and thus not in possession of any rights at all. It was not lost on me, an African-American man from Birmingham, Alabama, descended from slaves, that new legislation aimed at telling women what they might and might not do with their own physical bodies looked a whole lot like men owning women’s bodies.”
Dr. Parker will be speaking at the Church of the Covenant on the Case Western Reserve University campus. General admission is $10; student admission is $5. Doors are at 6:30pm, and the program begins at 7.
[Photo by Chad Griffith]
Cleveland, OH 44106