A National Model for Choosing LIfe on College Campuses

Lacy Dodd, a 33-year-old banking professional and mother of one, knows precisely where supporters and opponents of legal abortion can find common ground.

It's on nearly four acres donated by the Benedictine monks of Belmont Abbey in Belmont, N.C., where Room at the Inn, a Charlotte-based pregnancy resource center, hopes to build the nation's first campus-based maternity and after-care residence for pregnant college students.

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"The great unique thing about our project is that it's nonpartisan, it's an initiative that everyone can support," Dodd told CNS Sept. 29. "Pro-life or pro-choice, if we want women to feel that they have a choice, this is where we can all agree.

"The lack of resources is a huge cause of abortion," she added. "If women feel that they don't have the emotional resources, the financial resources, the educational resources" that they need to choose to give birth, "we can focus on giving them that choice."

This is very timely reading for me personally as I finish editing the final episode of Uncle Tom's Cabin. The last chapter is from Harriet Beecher Stowe and ends with a heartfelt exhortation to Christians to get involved in offering resources to help set slaves free as well as to support freed slaves in their midst, in the cases of those in the North.

As I read it aloud, and am now listening, I cannot but be struck by the fact that her point is directly applicable to the pro-life cause. If every mother who was facing a choice of giving life or having an abortion felt that they had something to fall back on in support while they were pregnant and later, how many would choose life? The change of hearts we need begins on our side in making sure resources are available and then that will help hearts change in those making that huge decision.

Thanks to Tony Rossi for sending me the story. You can hear an interview with Lacy Dodd on Christopher Closeup, the half-hour weekly radio interview produced by the Christophers, to mark Respect Life Month in October.

The radio interview airs Oct. 4, Respect Life Sunday, at 7 a.m. and 7:30 p.m. EDT on the Catholic Channel (Sirius 159 and XM 117), on the Relevant Radio network at 2:30 p.m. and online as a podcast.