I never would have thought that a woman named Grace would be responsible for me becoming a mother. When I was in turmoil just a few weeks from this time last year, trying to decide whether to have an abortion or not, I did not know that my grandmother was talking about my predicament to her friend Grace. My grandmother had at first encouraged me to have the abortion, because my husband and I were fighting about my keeping it. I did not know what I wanted, truly. I kept making appointments at Planned Parenthood and not showing up for them.

“Tell her to keep the baby,” said Grace. “My daughter had an abortion years ago and it has affected her all her life.”

My grandmother remembered her friend Patty Richman, who committed suicide in her forties. She too, had had an abortion, while she was in college, and it haunted her the rest of her life.

That same day, my grandmother had called me sobbing, telling me that she changed her mind, begging me to keep the baby, even saying that God had intended for me to have the baby. I remember it yesterday - the seemingly magical transformation that my grandmother had undergone. I sobbed along with her on the phone, relieved that she would support me keeping the baby, even if I had to raise it as a single mother.

I will always be pro-choice. But I personally believe that abortion would have been the wrong choice for me. It was Grace that saved a wretch like me, and made me a mother.