Angela Weszely didn’t go looking for a calling on abortion. Twenty-one years ago she took a job at a Christian pregnancy center in Chicago, and within her first interview she found a brochure in the lobby that made her uncomfortable: statistics about children raised by single parents, framed to steer women away from adoption and toward fear. It was her first hint that the organization’s language about “loving women” didn’t match what was actually happening in the room. That discomfort became a two-decade journey that led her to found ProGrace and write Becoming ProGrace: Expanding the Abortion Conversation Beyond Life Versus Choice.
Why Pro-Life and Pro-Choice Aren’t the Right Starting Point
Angela’s core argument isn’t about where someone lands on the morality of abortion. It’s about whether the church resembles Jesus in how it responds to people facing it. She’s watched Christians treat “pro-life” and “pro-choice” as identity markers, sometimes Democrat or Republican first and Christian second, when the more urgent question is simpler: do we actually believe every life carries equal value and equal dignity, and are we living like it?
The Theology the Church Keeps Getting Wrong
Angela walks through a four-part framework she’s refined over a decade of leading ProGrace. Christians affirm equal value and equal dignity in theory, but haven’t reckoned with the undercurrent of misogyny that still shapes how women are treated in these conversations. Political identity often crowds out shared Christian conviction. Grace gets skipped in favor of condemnation. And responsibility gets flattened into an individual woman’s decision, ignoring the partner, the community, and the church’s own role in creating a culture where abortion can feel like the only option.
Why Only 7% of Women Ever Tell Their Church
Angela cites research showing that only 7% of women approach a church for support before an abortion decision, and just 16% of women who regularly attend church do. That statistic, she argues, isn’t evidence that women facing unintended pregnancy are avoiding accountability. It’s evidence that the church hasn’t earned their trust. Women describe absorbing a narrative for years, sometimes from their own parents or pastors, about how they’ll be judged if they carry a pregnancy to term. By the time she’s standing outside a clinic, the decision was shaped long before that moment.
What the Woman Caught in Adultery Actually Reveals
Markus and Angela spend a good stretch of the conversation in John 8, the story of the woman caught in adultery. Angela points out that the passage is usually remembered for one line: “go and sin no more.” But she reads the story in order. The first sin is cosmic: the Pharisees are trying to trap Jesus. The second is systemic: they’ve dragged a woman out alone, in violation of the law that required both parties be brought forward, and no one in two thousand years of commentary has named that injustice. Only after that does Jesus address her personally, and even then, his first word to her is not condemnation. Angela’s point is that the church tends to skip straight to the individual sin and miss the cosmic and systemic layers Jesus deals with first.
What It Means to Be the Beloved
Some of the most personal moments in the conversation come when Angela and Markus talk about identity. Angela grew up believing she could lose her salvation over minor failures, and describes an encounter with the love of God that reshaped her, so much that she has the word “beloved” tattooed on her wrist. She connects that identity directly to how the church engages abortion: Christians who are anchored in being beloved don’t need to make a woman’s decision about their own moral scorecard. They’re free to actually see her.
Discussion Questions
- Angela says pro-life and pro-choice aren’t helpful descriptors for Christians to lead with. Do you agree, and what would you use instead?
- What does it look like practically for a church to affirm “equal value, equal dignity” for both women and children, rather than just saying it?
- Only 7% of women approach a church before an abortion decision. What do you think is driving that number in your own church or community?
- Angela describes a narrative that says a woman is responsible for a pregnancy more than her partner is. Where have you seen that narrative show up, even subtly?
- How does the order of events in John 8 (cosmic sin, then systemic injustice, then individual sin) change how you read that story?
- Angela says the church has focused on “did we tell her” rather than on freedom and life-giving grace. What’s the difference in practice?
- What would it look like for your church to be a place someone would actually turn to first in a crisis pregnancy, rather than last?
- Angela connects the abortion conversation to a deeper identity question: are we secure in being God’s beloved? How does insecurity in that identity shape how we treat others?
- Markus raises the idea of objectification, treating a woman’s decision as a means to an end so a Christian can feel they “got it right.” Where else do you see that dynamic at work?
- If a woman in your life told you she was pregnant and considering an abortion, what would you want your first response to be?
