She was only 16, pregnant, and scared.
It was 1972. That teen was Christie Ballor.
Now 67, Ballor still lives in Alliance, Ohio, where she was born. She recalled her road to recovery from having an abortion at a young age—and now witnessing Roe’s historic overturning a full 50 years later.
Her parents didn’t know better. Lacking guidance, Ballor conceived out of wedlock with her then boyfriend. Fear-driven, she visited a Canton Planned Parenthood where she was told her unborn baby was just a “lump of cells,” like a “tumor.”
She now agonizes over how foolish she was.
“I look back and I think, ‘How could I believe something like that?’” she told the newspaper. “This was not something that was sometimes said; it’s been said over and over and over. They stopped saying it publicly so much because there’s so much science that they have to refute, but one-on-one? Oh yeah.”…