Expert Witness

And, as LaRue says, "it worked." She kept it all silent for decades -- and that took its toll. "I was an unhappy, angry little girl," LaRue says. "By 15, I had a serious drinking problem and became promiscuous." Even though she made good grades, she quit school at the end of first semester senior year. She was barely 17.

She moved to Moline, Ill., and got her first "real job," she says, as a secretary. And once again, she was in danger. It was 1956 and there weren't even words to discuss issues such as sexual harassment. Each month, LaRue says, the men in her office sent her out to buy the latest issue of Playboy magazine.

"It was my job to buy the magazine and to clear the phones, then mix the drinks," she says. "One of these times, one of the guys said, 'You know, you're prettier than any of the girls in this magazine. Why don't you let us take your picture?' And one of them just happened to have a camera. Even now sometimes I wonder where those pictures might be.

"When I look back on my teen years now, I see the profile of an abused child."

Marilyn Cirimele doesn't see her sister much, but they e-mail each other a lot, she says. LaRue is eight years older. The two have grown closer in adulthood and in their faith, Cirimele says, but she and LaRue didn't share similar childhoods.

She didn't learn about her sister's youthful travails until fairly recently, she says. "She wrote an article and she talked about having an abortion and that was the first I heard about it. . . . I didn't know anything actually until the last few years when she started her work.

"I guess it was just surprise. I was sad, of course -- you don't want that to happen to anybody, and then to have it happen to your sister. . . . She grew up a lot differently than I did."

Endings and Beginnings

"I can see myself on the table."

LaRue is in a doctor's office, though she can't see his face anymore, not the way she can see herself and that table. It has been nearly 50 years since she made the decision to end her first pregnancy. She is engaged to an older man, she is upset, she is embarrassed and worried that if the pregnancy continues, people will be able to count back and know the truth about her: She had sex before marriage. The Supreme Court would not rule on Roe v. Wade until 1973.

"Within 12 hours of me letting my desires be known, I had an appointment" in the office of a private doctor, LaRue says.

"I remember asking if there was anything there," she says. "The doctor said no, it's just a blob of tissue. But after the procedure, my soon-to-be mother-in-law said, 'You know, it was a boy.'

"My position of pro-life isn't just theoretical. I have two children and I should have three."