Janet began posting here two weeks ago and mentioned early on she was post-abortive. Following is Janet's conversion story. The photo, right, is of Janet, taken from her blog. I applaud Janet's honesty and bravery.

All through my teen years, I was a huge proponent of women's rights. After years of preaching about how a woman should be able to do what she wants with her body, there came a time for me to make the choice.

All my friends were pro-choice. No one suggested options. I mean, I was 18, I had a big career and lots of moneyahead of me, I was smart and young, I couldn't be a mother. No way. There was no choice to make. I was going to have an abortion. And that was it....

My counselor assured me of my decision. Now I could get on with my life, finish college, reach my goals, dump my jerk boyfriend - get my life back.

Next morning, I had breakfast and went off to my abortion. The waiting room was quiet. The abortion was noisy. I threw up on the nurse holding my hand. The doctor was annoyed but silent besides telling me not to move.

Afterwards, I sat in a recliner with other girls my age. We were all still. The doctor, still wearing his mask, told me everything went well. He patted my shoulder and left. Emily held my hand for half an hour, then left.

I drove home. I didn't talk to anyone. I had made the choice I had been fighting for. All my friends quietly went about me. There was no more talk of rights.

Then I was 20. I was pregnant again despite the Pill, condoms, foam, and the sponge. Choice time again. My boyfriend asked, "What are you going to do?" After all, it was my body, my choice. I told him to get lost. I remembered the noises. The small something growing, then gone. I looked back over the past two years and saw none of the things that were promised me happened.

After my daughter was born, I knew what I had done two years before was wrong. It wasn't "it" or a blob of blood. "It" was a baby.

I questioned all the things I previously believed. Hungry for truth, I studied books on life and faith. I looked for meaning. I tried to prove moral relativism - God was what you made God. The harder I tried, the more I became convinced of Christianity. I could not disprove Christ or His Word.

After all this, I became a Christian. I've been following Jesus for 11 years now. The mercy and love bestowed on me by the Lord is overwhelming. His Truth is what I've been after the whole time.

Right now, I counsel women who've had abortions. There are so many stories, so many hurting.

Women's rights? Choice?

The death of a child is neither.

SamanthaT started blogging here in March. This is a sample of her position then: "[A]s a pro-choice advocate, I support a woman's right to privately choose the course of her pregnancy." 250 posts later, with no warning, Sammie suddenly posted this on April 10:

"I'm converted."

Valerie, like the rest of us, was shocked:

"Samantha - huh? Sarcasm? Truth? Trying to see how easy it is to make me confused? Stop being a tease! We need a bit more info. ;-)"

To which SamanthaT responded:

"Valerie Im serious! =) I can't rationalize the legal killing of babies."

And that was it. SamanthaT amazingly and quickly became a staunch and persuasive defender of life here. We are all proud of SamanthaT.

Here is SamanthaT's touching story....

I was pretty hard-core pro-life through most of my teenage years. This was due to my personal reasoning and a lack of understanding of what was involved in the process of deciding to have an abortion more than anything else, because abortion has never been discussed in my home and I actually don't know how my parents, or most of my friends, even feel about it.

When I got to college, my world expanded exponentially. I became involved in activities I thought I would never participate in, and I made friends with tons of people that were completely different from my friends from home. I converted quickly to pro-choice as I began to see the difference a baby made in the lives of some of my new friends, and I knew having a child would devastate the plan I had set for myself.

After a series of personal traumas that were life-altering on a small scale, I found myself pregnant and alone. I hardly even considered my options before I settled on abortion. I did not discuss my plan with anyone but began researching the abortion clinics that were accessible to me. As I did so, I came into a knowledge of the medical process of abortion that was so profound that I could not commit this new life grwoing inside me to be ended in such a way. However, realizing how my life would change, I became an even stronger pro-choice voice.

Soon after discovering I was pregnant, I miscarried. By this time I had become actively involved in some online discussions about the morality of abortion, and I was having an increasingly difficult time refuting the logic of the pro-lifers I encountered there. Finally, I realized that what I was supporting actively was the sanctioned killing of babies, and I could continue to do so no longer.

I now consider myself a liberal pro-lifer. I disagree with extreme pro-life methods on a fundamental basis, and I have no solution for women who are in difficult but not life-threatening pregnancies. However, I believe that my "conversion" was not a step in the right direction, but rather a turn back to the right direction.

Naaman is a commenter on this site. Here is his story:

All of my life, I considered myself to be "pro-choice." What choice did I have, really? I was raised in a feminist, pro-abortion, liberal family. Both my parents were members of the National Organization for Women. I grew up in NOW; I was committed. I attended every pro-abortion march or rally I could.

And I did something worse: I volunteered as an accessory to abortion.

There was an abortion clinic in Falls Church, VA, called the Commonwealth Women's Center. Unfortunately for the clinic, it was right next door to a Catholic church. Eventually, the clinic became annoyed by the constant presence of pro-life protestors, and it sent a request for help to the local NOW chapters. We responded.

My specialty was "escort duty." The idea was to have a number of sympathetic people escort the prospective patient from her car, across the parking lot, and into the clinic. Ideally, every escort detail was supposed to include a man or two....

More than anything else I did as a pro-abortion activist, that "escort duty" still haunts me. Most of the women I escorted were deeply upset. At the time, I assumed the pro-life protesters were the main cause of their distress, but now I know differently. In any case, I had direct, personal contact with troubled women who were carrying new life. Instead of offering them help or hope, I lured them into the mouth of a ravenous beast that devoured their children and spit the walking-wounded women back onto the street.

Fortunately, I drifted away from pro-abortion activism when I went to college. My views hadn't changed, though.

On Good Friday 2001 the Holy Spirit moved within me, and I was led to a true faith in Christ. We left Quakerism and became Lutheran. We started to get involved with various evangelism classes and activities. The central message of our evangelism training was that everyone matters to God. Jesus died to redeem all of humanity, not just the people who look like us, act like us, or live near us. Every single human being is so loved by God that any one of us would have been enough to send His Son to the cross. It's hard to accept that message and still support the legalized slaughter of God's children.

That's one part of my conversion. The other part came from being a father.

In 1999, my wife became pregnant with our first child. Early in the pregnancy, there were several bleeding scares. On every scare, our HMO insisted on bringing my wife in for an ultrasound. As a result, we got a good look at those early weeks of pregnancy. Also, the stress of the bleeding pulled me past any point of uncertainty about whether or not our unborn child was a "real" human being. Through God's mercy, the bleeding all turned out to be nothing, and my son was born in 2000. Still, if God wanted to get my attention, He succeeded admirably.

Thus was I led from being a pro-abortion fanatic, hardened by a childhood of activism, into being one of those pro-lifers I used to hold in such contempt. How anyone can doubt the humanity of the unborn seems to be a mystery to me now. Of course unborn children are human! Even from a secular viewpoint, science tells us that "embryos" and "fetuses" are really just stages in human development.

The Christian perspective reinforces that human life is precious, even (or especially) within the womb. The Psalms sing about the womb as the starting point for faith, righteousness, and/or evil. In Psalm 139, the psalmist praises God for knowing him and forming him within his mother's womb. The first chapters of Jeremiah and Luke both show us prophets who received their Godly commissions while still within the womb.

God is King of all Creation, but He still allows us to have our free will. By using that free will to kill untold millions of children, what sort of monstrous sin have we committed? All is not lost, as 1st John tells us, because we can confess our sins and receive forgiveness. But that same passage also tells us that if we attempt to deny our sins, we are calling God a liar and His Word will not be within us. In some ways, that is the worst crime of the pro-abortionmovement. As if killing millions of children wasn't bad enough, they portray abortion as a sacred right.

Pro-abortion activists have led women and doctors into committing the grievous sin of infanticide and then deny them the possibility of forgiveness by denying that any sin was committed.

I'm launching a new feature called "Conversion stories." There have been a couple on this blog in the last month - abortion proponents who came here to duel and over time converted to the pro-life position.

I applaud these people for giving honest thought to pro-life apologetics, confronting their own ideology with it, and then publicly making the switch. This is a major undertaking.

I also applaud the dedicated pro-life conversationalists on this blog for their wit, knowledge, passion, honest concern for people behind the debate, and for not letting one falsehood go unanswered.

Today, we honor prettyinpink, aka PIP or Kate. PIP politely introduced herself to us a month ago as one who "used to be blindly conservative, but sometime during high school I became an active liberal." Somewhere, though, during her 378 (!) posts, PIP changed her thinking. Here is her story.

First, meet PIP on this video a friend and she made of the song, "You can call me Al." (PIP is a big fan of Simon & Garfunkel.)

PIP's story....

I've been a liberal ever since I started to make my own opinions. In middle school, I was conservative, because that is what my friends were. [But] I began looking at all of the arguments, and I tended to choose the most empathetic viewpoint, which tended to keep me on the liberal side of things.

I always felt pro-choice WAS the most empathetic view because it seemed really cruel to force someone to stay pregnant considering all of the problems it may cause in our increasingly stressful and at times unforgiving society....

At the time, I kept thinking "if I were pregnant, people would stop talking to me. I would drop out of high school and never get the dream job I've always wanted. And these people are wanting to force these women into these situations." It seemed so asinine to think that this tiny clump of cells was worth more to them than the lives of the mothers.

Because I'm a big fan of science many of my previous debates have been in favor of evolution, but that got very tiring.... I thought it would be more fun to debate something that was more of a gray area. This site is very fun and extremely addictive. But when I started listening to the arguments, more and more I started to agree with the pro-life side.

Although I never approved of late term abortions it dawned on me that my arguments couldn't work on any other group of the population, except, in my opinion, the unborn. I realized how ridiculous it was.

But I couldn't bring it to myself to become pro-life because of everything that came with it. I couldn't see myself protesting at Planned Parenthood, because at least they offer health services, for example. I checked out Feminists for Life (I am a big feminist myself), and reading their mission statement I thought "bingo. This is what I'm looking for."

I guess right now I should classify myself as a liberal pro-lifer. I mean, I still support IVF, birth control, sex education, and all that, but responsibility is very important in my understanding of these issues.

And I'm still pretty liberal on a lot of other issues (although, the Oklahoman idea of liberal is pretty much the American idea of centrist).

I think that, once we have the opportunities to help every woman in need, abortion will stop being a symptom of a society that makes a woman choose between education and children. We will become a society that allows both, and since abortion would be practically meaningless, we can begin to make elective abortion illegal.