A woman who had an abortion when she was a teenager is now helping to protect the lives of women and unborn children.
Today Marilee Morris has two children, but when she was younger she was involved in drugs and tried everything she could to be popular.
She got pregnant with her boyfriend and had an abortion – choosing to “save myself instead of my child”.
Walk away
But now, extraordinarily, she has shared her story in a video at a pro-life event in Kentucky, where she received a standing ovation.
In the video, Marilee explains how she later met her husband-to-be but he said she would have to leave her drugs lifestyle to have a relationship with him.
“In that moment, I had to make a choice”, she commented, “and I really really liked him, so I made a choice to walk away from all that”.
Two lives
From then on, her life changed, she began going to church, and she now has two young boys. Marilee said she feels like it is her job, as someone who has gone through abortion, to “help other women make a different choice”.
She says it is her aim to reach as many women as possible with her story, so that “two lives will be saved”.
Earlier this year a mother in the UK spoke out after rejecting abortion.
Doctors told Stacey Dickinson that her son Freddie-Lee could be born with Down’s syndrome or small limbs.
Pressure
Freddie was born with serious health complications but has battled on and the family recently celebrated his first birthday.
Speaking to the Lancashire Evening Post, Stacey explained what doctors told her: “Right up to 29 weeks they were trying to make me get rid of him because they said he would not survive”.
“It got to the stage where I didn’t want to go to ante-natal classes because I knew they would keep trying to convince me to have an abortion”, she added.