'I think of them every day'

May 22—If you read her recently published memoir, "Society's Child," you'll see many facets of Deborah Daniels-Switzer.

You'll meet the West Pittston resident when she was a little girl, moping on a lawn and resenting the way her older brother gets to go off to baseball practice while she's stuck with the dandelion-digging chore. You'll see how she becomes "a child of divorce, left to my own devices," bullied, lonely, held back to repeat ninth grade, and desperate for friends, any friends.

You'll encounter her, years later, as a "hippie chick" hitchhiking from state to state with little thought of danger. And you'll probably imagine her voice, which friends have compared to Karen Carpenter's rich contralto, as she sings her way through the Midwest in a band.

Somewhere in between uprooting those dandelions and singing in the band, Daniels-Switzer had her first abortion.

It took place on her 17th birthday, and she had flown to England, accompanied by her older sister, to have the procedure there because it was 1969, and abortions were illegal in the United States.

Throughout the next decade, she would have four more abortions, all in this country.

If all you knew about Daniels-Switzer was that she had five abortions, you might assume — as politicians and demonstrators and people in general talk about the future of Roe v. Wade — that she would not want that 1973 Supreme Court ruling to be overturned.

But the opposite is true.

"I think of them every day," she said, referring to the five children she might have had, and wishing with all her heart that she had made different decisions.

"I'm 70 years old now, and it would have been just nine months out of my life," she said, thinking of her first pregnancy. "I'm sure if I had the baby, it would have helped me not to become pregnant four more times. But I ended up having four more, hating myself each time."

Daniels-Switzer said her primary purpose in writing the story of her life is to try to steer other women away from abortion, so they can be spared what she calls her "inner struggles and deep remorse."

"I was a big pro-choice person for many years," she said. "So I've been on both sides."

She switched sides in 1982 after she heard a woman talk about her own abortion experience at church, and "saw the pictures she brought of aborted babies, buckets of them, even fully developed ones burned by saline."

"I tried to catch my breath. I thought I was going to faint," Daniels-Switzer wrote in her book. "The real truth of what I had done, what I was allowed to do, what others had encouraged me to do and what I had taken part in, was hitting me in the face like a baseball bat."

"It was the pictures of the aborted babies that showed me the lies I had been told," said Daniels-Switzer said, who contacted the local chapter of Pennsylanians For Human Life and was soon telling her own story at Catholic high schools and churches of various denominations. "When I was at the abortion clinics, a nurse would be there to hold my hand and I would ask, 'It's not a baby, is it?' They would always say no, it's a blob of tissue."

As she wrote in her memoir, "I read a book many years later and was surprised when it named and talked about the exact same doctor we used in London that fateful day. It told of the women who'd had a D & C (dilation and curettage) procedure in their second trimester, like me. I had allowed my son or daughter to be stabbed and pulled out of me, piece by piece. Then the doctor pieced the baby back together on a cold silver tray to make sure he got the entire child out. The baby had hands and toes, a heart and a face. There was a nearby container for the doctor to throw the tiny arms and legs and the rest of the body into."

When a reporter asked what she wishes had happened differently, Daniels-Switzer talked about her mother's reaction to her pregnancy. Her mother was not happy about the situation, and ultimately recommended an abortion as "our solution to the problem."

"I wish my mother would have said that it's not right in the eyes of God to have an abortion or let's search this out or look at a developing fetus in the library."

If she had seen how much a second-trimester fetus looks like a fully-formed baby, Daniels-Switzer said, she never would have had an abortion.

Even if it had been earlier in her pregnancy, and the embryo had looked like "a blob of tissue," the woman Daniels-Switzer is today says an abortion would still be ending a human life.

"An unborn baby is like a Polaroid picture," she said, explaining she heard that comparison in a radio broadcast hosted by anti-abortion activist Charlie Kirk. "It's like a picture of a beautiful sunset that looks like a smudge at first. The picture is there, even if you can't see it. And if you rip the Polaroid picture into tiny pieces and say it was never a sunset, you're wrong."

Looking back at her early years, Daniels-Switzer wishes she hadn't been influenced by television, music, images of Marilyn Monroe, and magazine articles about free love to believe that "it must be a good thing to gain attention by using your body."

That was the old Daniels-Switzer. The new Daniels-Switzer says her "life changed overnight when I met Jesus."

After her conversion experience she lost her craving for cigarettes; she began apologizing to people she had offended. And, as the title of one chapter in her book indicates she found "A Decent Man For A Change."

She met Clark Switzer, a history teacher and maker of documentaries, at a flea market. They got married and, together, raised her son from a previous relationship as well as a son they had together. Daniels-Switzer, whose jobs had ranged from tending bar to cleaning houses to professional singing, earned a degree in psychology from King's College and worked as a social worker.

Soon the couple will have five grandchildren, she said. And when their grandchildren are old enough to understand "Society's Child," which she describes as "PG-16," she hopes they will read it and learn from it.

She also hopes that anyone who has had an abortion and regrets it, will find comfort in her story because she is confident that "in spite of my deplorable past, God loves me. I'm forgiven."

Daniels-Switzer believes God wants her to share her story, that it will do some good in the world, even though it was difficult.

"Bringing this out to the public, letting people know what's in the book, about the abortions, is not easy, never has been. It's like a gay person coming out!" she wrote in an email.

And, she knows what she has to say will make some people angry.

Her husband, Clark, addressed that likelihood in an introduction to the book: "When someone chooses to speak out, condemnation often comes quickly and without mercy — especially from those who want to protect the status quo. Yet openness is a necessary step to what brings change and ultimately, freedom to those caught in the lies of society. Love will prevail. And love is what bubbles up and radiates outward from the depth of my precious bride. It is her love for others, a desire to see people free, that compels her to expose what many others would keep hidden."

Daniels-Switzer's book, "Society's Child, The Truth About the Lies," is available through amazon.com. She may be reached at hischild1981@yahoo.com.