Please join Red Emma's and the Baltimore Abortion Fund as we welcome Dr. Willie Parker to speak about his new book Life's Work. In Life’s Work, Dr. Willie
Parker tells a deeply personal and thought-provoking narrative 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, are
slowly chipping away at the rights of women to control their own lives.
In revealing his daily battle against mandatory waiting periods and
bogus rules governing the width of hallways, Dr. Parker uncovers the
growing number of strings attached to the right to choose and makes a
powerful Christian case for championing reproductive rights.
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 entirely on providing safe abortions for the women
who need help the most—often women in poverty and women of color—and in
the hot bed of the pro-choice debate: the South. He soon thereafter
traded in his private practice and his penthouse apartment in Hawaii for
the life of an itinerant abortion provider, focusing most recently on
women in the Deep South.