It’s Personal

Craig Kellogg Galer on the Consequences of One Birth Before Roe v. Wade

Sometime in the mid-1970s, when I was in college, the realization dawned on me that, as an adoptee, I had been somebody’s “unwanted pregnancy” once upon a time. In the fullness of time, especially after my wife and I got married and began having children together, that realization became one of my strongest motivations to search for my birth-mother—I wanted to thank the woman who, though I had never met her, had carried me in her womb for nine months and seen me through to the beginnings of my life in this world (and for me as an adoptee, even such a basic concept as that I’d been carried in someone’s womb once-upon-a-time could be disconcertingly abstract).

Along with that realization came the understanding that, all things considered, I was probably fortunate to have been born before 1973 and Roe v. Wade. I had never staked out a firmly held position on abortion, but once I understood that if I had been conceived in a later time, I would have been a likely candidate for abortion, the question took on an entirely different, and personal, aspect.

Feeling Trapped

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Craig Kellogg Galer is a retired automotive engineer. He and his wife Jennifer have eight children and eight grandchildren. Roman Catholics, they do marriage ministry for their home parish, Church of the Resurrection, in Lansing, Michigan, and are members of the Work of Christ, an ecumenical charismatic community in Lansing.

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It's Personal

on the Consequences of One Birth Before Roe v. Wade by Craig Kellogg Galer

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