“I believe that as an abortion provider, I am doing God’s work,” Parker writes in his new memoir, “Life’s Work.” “I am protecting
women’s rights, their human right to decide their futures for themselves, and to live their lives as they see fit.”
Since childhood, Parker had been taught that abortion was wrong, and for the first half of his career as an OB-GYN, he refused to perform abortions.
Meet Dr. Willie Parker, a Southern Christian Abortion Provider -
No issue in America is more toxic than abortion, and that’s partly because it is today so closely associated with religion.
Yet today it’s taken as self-evident among conservative Christians
that life begins at fertilization — without realizing that this would have astonished many Christians throughout the ages.
Parker accepts that a fetus is alive — but says that life doesn’t begin at conception, because an egg is alive as well, and so is a sperm.
Dr. Parker is black, feminist and driven by his Christian faith to provide abortions
in the South, where women seeking to terminate a pregnancy have few options.
“It is not a switch that turns on in an instant, like an electric light.”
Parker is outraged at the profusion of laws around the country chipping away at abortion rights, and he objects
that much of the critique of abortion is based on bad science — yet doctors are sometimes legally obliged to provide incorrect information to patients.