The year was 1962, and in Southern California, a pregnant teenager was facing a difficult decision. As a young, unwed girl, Mary Lynn Sheridan wasn’t sure she was ready for a child.
How would she tell her family? If she was going to keep the baby, how would she care for it?
She drove with two friends to an abortion clinic over the Mexican border.
However, while on the drive to the clinic, Mary Lynn had a change of heart. The young mother decided against the plan, and sometime later gave birth to a healthy baby boy at an unwed mother’s home in Los Angeles. She gave the baby up for adoption. Six weeks later, a wonderful couple brought him home and into a loving family.
Thirty-six years later, that boy, through an accident, found the contact information for his birth mother. After a family discussion, he sent a handwritten note to Mary Lynn Sheridan. After 10 days, he received a joyful call from Mary Lynn, and through the tears, she managed to ask how he was doing and if he was healthy.
She told him about the hope and pain she felt every year on his birthday and that she prayed for him daily.
I was that adopted boy and Mary Lynn Sheridan is my birth mother.
I am Congressman David Schweikert, and I am here because of a young woman’s commitment to life in spite of overwhelming difficulties.
People often ask me why I am pro-life. I tell them my story and about the wonderful love I experienced from not only my adopted mother, but my birth mother as well. If anyone has a compelling reason to support life, it would be me.
Ronald Reagan made a great observation when he said, “Abortion is advocated only by persons who have themselves been born.”
My life hung in the balance on a car ride to an abortion clinic 49 years ago. I take very seriously my responsibility to defend the lives of those unborn children who may be in the same situation as I was. My fight is for those unborn and innocent babies who cannot yet defend themselves.
I am a firm believer that life begins at conception.
Any attempt to take a human life in the womb is morally unconscionable. Just like our Founding Fathers did, we must acknowledge that every American, born and unborn, has the God-given right to liberty, the pursuit of happiness and, most importantly, life.
I always have and always will support the interests of organizations that provide encouragement and resources to women with crisis pregnancies. I believe this is a very necessary contribution we must make.
However, I will never support a “medical procedure” that is administered with the intent of purposefully terminating a life. It is time we end a medical practice that not only takes the lives of innocent children, but scars the women who go through it.
As someone who was fortunate to have a mother who chose adoption over abortion, I will always be pro-life. Mary Lynn Sheridan summoned the courage to bring me into this world, and I will always honor her and the choice she made by defending the sanctity of life.
David Schweikert represents Arizona’s 5th Congressional District.
