WaPo: “Thomas Stovall grew up in a strict Baptist family in Mississippi and always believed that anyone involved with abortion was destined for hell.
But his lifelong conviction crumbled when his wife, Chelsea, was 20 weeks pregnant with their third child. Tests showed a severely malformed and underdeveloped fetus, one that was sure to be stillborn if carried to term. There was other devastating news, too. Continuing with the pregnancy could threaten Chelsea’s health and future fertility, doctors warned.
The couple live in Arkansas, which has a near-total ban on abortion and is surrounded by states with their own highly restrictive laws. So they drove 400 miles to reach a clinic in Illinois where they could end the pregnancy. As they did, Stovall says he’d decided he was “dead wrong about abortion being a sin.”
He began knocking on doors, hoping to change other men’s minds and help get an abortion measure on the state ballot this fall.
Two years after the Supreme Court toppled federal protections for the procedure, growing numbers of men in red states are speaking out in defense of reproductive rights because of the harrowing experiences they’ve seen wives or partners go through when pregnancies went tragically awry, endangering their health or ability to bear children. Some, like Stovall, had been staunch abortion opponents; others concede they’d given the issue little thought until it hit close to home.”