WASHINGTON — Pamela Whitehead wants women contemplating having an abortion to hear an unlikely message of hope from her own powerful story of struggle, survival, and redemption.
The executive director of Pro-Love Ministries, Whitehead shared her saga Monday as she and others waited for a ruling from the U.S. Supreme Court that they believe will overturn the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that made abortion a federal right.
“My God has taken everything in my life that was meant for evil and he is using it for good,” Whitehead said as she waited with pro-life demonstrators outside the court building.
Whitehead’s journey began the very same year the Roe decision came down, when her mother, impregnated at just 15 by an ex-con who would later beat her to death, decided to have her baby.
“My mother’s first choice was abortion because she was told it was her fundamental right,” Pamela said. “And she was a young mom, of course she felt like she couldn’t do this on her own. Her circumstances were terrible. But thankfully my grandfather stood up for me.”
The decision spared Whitehead’s life but did not save her from decades of hopelessness and misery. Eight years later, her mother would die by her father’s hand and Whitehead found herself shunted off to a foster home where she faced constant sexual abuse. She turned in her foster dad, who went to prison, she said. Once she reached adulthood, she did a stint in the army, where she says she was again sexually assaulted and even gang-raped.
Whitehead knows hers was a life some may think would have been better off snuffed out in the womb.
“Now the abortion industry would tell you that it would have been better if I had never been born, because I was gonna suffer later in life,” Whitehead said. “I became alcoholic, drug addicted, I felt abandoned, neglected, and my life really was hopeless. I had no hope whatsoever.”
After the military, Whitehead became a mother of two even as she drifted into a life of drugs and streetwalking. In 2001, when she wound up pregnant yet again, by an unknown father, she made the decision her mother had rejected all those years ago.
“I had no hope,” she said. “I didn’t know what to do and I made the decision to have an abortion in that pregnancy.”
Whitehead doesn’t want any woman to ever be where she was. Her Pro-Love Ministries, which hosts the crisis line LoveLine, is dedicated to helping women in need by providing them with “ongoing support in your own community through loving volunteers and organizations that we have a relationship with.”
Whitehead knows that wrenching poverty often triggers the hopelessness that leads to the decision to abort a pregnancy. Her group has a simple message for women in such a position.
“You’re not alone,” Whitehead tells women. “I’ve been where you’ve been.”
“I believe a hero is a person who, in a moment of time, they act on a need that is greater than themselves,” she said.
The painful memory of her own experience remains fresh enough for Whitehead to convey to young mothers. And the journey she began eight years later stands as a testament that even the faintest faint flicker of hope can grow and illuminate the path to salvation.
“For [nearly] 10 years I sat on that, I didn’t talk to a single person because I believed that I got what I deserved,” Whitehead said. “All that shame, all that guilt that I felt, that I deserved that. So I didn’t say anything about it until I surrendered my life to Christ in 2009.”
Her efforts in Pro-Life Ministries were borne of the knowledge that love and encouragement at so many junctures in her life could have given her strength.
“I look back on my life and I think, what if my foster mother had stood up for me?” she said. “What would’ve the direction of my life been like? What if my grandfather hadn’t stood up for me? I wouldn’t be here today.”
Now she is determined to provide that support for others from the organization’s Texas home.
“We own a home, where we house women who have children who need a safe place to transition,” she said. “We provide for financial needs of women every single day.
“We’ve had women who have had late-term abortions contacting us, they made this appointment out of desperation, feeling like they had no other option, and we’ve been able to help them turn their lives around, change their mind, and today they are empowered, they’re parenting their own children, they’re in their own apartments,” she said proudly.
Whitehead said many of the women who call the ministries’ hotline are fleeing domestic violence, have a history of substance abuse, or have been sexually exploited. She and her fellow advocates view their role as to “serve them.”
Providing compassion and hope rather than condemnation is the way Whitehead hopes to change minds while she waits for the Supreme Court to change the law.
“Every person who stands in front of an abortion facility praying, peacefully offering resources and help…thank you!” she said. “Every person who volunteers at a pregnancy center, thank you! If you had been in my life that day, I don’t know what would have happened.”