An outspoken, Christian reproductive justice advocate and abortion provider--one of the few doctors to provide such services to women in Mississippi and Alabama--draws from his personal and professional journeys as well as the scientific training he received as a doctor to reveal how he came to believe that helping women in need, without judgment, is precisely the Christian thing to do.

"An abortion provider and Christian reproductive justice advocate draws from his personal journey and professional scientific training as a doctor to reveal how he came to believe, unequivocally, that helping women in need, without judgment, is precisely the Christian thing to do. Dr. Willie Parker grew up in the Deep South, lived in a Christian household, and converted to an even more fundamentalist form of Christianity as a young man. But upon reading an interpretation of the Good Samaritan in a sermon by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., he realized that in order to be a true Christian, he must show compassion for all women regardless of their needs. In 2009, he stopped practicing obstetrics to focus on providing safe abortions for the women who need help the most--often women in poverty and women in the South, the hotbed of the pro-choice debate. He soon thereafter traded in his private practice and his penthouse apartment in Hawaii for the life of an itinerant abortion provider, moving between Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia. Dr. Willie Parker tells a deeply personal and thought-provoking narrative, one that illuminates the complex societal, political, religious, and personal realities of abortion in the United States from the unique perspective of someone who performs them and defends the right to do so every day. He also looks at how a new wave of anti-abortion activism, aimed at making incremental changes in laws and regulations state by state, is chipping away at the rights of women to control their own lives. In revealing his daily battle against mandatory waiting periods, bogus rules, and pseudoscience, Dr. Parker uncovers the growing number of strings attached to a woman's right to choose and makes a powerful Christian case for championing reproductive rights. "With phrases like 'pro-life' and 'culture of life,'" he writes, "the antis seized the moral high ground nearly forty years ago, and they retain it to this day, because abortion-rights activists ... have never mounted a significant religious or moral counterargument." Until now."--Jacket.