{"id":262760,"date":"2022-02-18T08:38:34","date_gmt":"2022-02-18T14:38:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.liveaction.org\/news\/?p=262760"},"modified":"2022-02-21T11:49:42","modified_gmt":"2022-02-21T17:49:42","slug":"exclusive-carol-swain-abortion-redemption-odds","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.liveaction.org\/news\/exclusive-carol-swain-abortion-redemption-odds\/","title":{"rendered":"EXCLUSIVE: Dr. Carol Swain’s powerful story of abortion, redemption, and overcoming the odds"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Dr. Carol Swain is an award-winning political scientist, a formerly tenured professor at Princeton University and Vanderbilt University, and the author of 11 books<\/a>. Additionally, she is a Distinguished Senior Fellow for Constitutional Studies at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, and an educational advisor for the American Cornerstone Institute, which was founded by Dr. Ben Carson. She has earned five degrees, including a Ph.D., and by all accounts has had an impressive and illustrious career.<\/p>\n

But to get there, she had much to overcome. She suffered severe poverty, dropped out of high school, became a teenage mother, and had an abortion. But through it all, Dr. Swain never stopped striving to improve, and decades later, realized that redemption for her past was possible, too.<\/p>\n

A difficult childhood<\/h3>\n

Swain was born in Bedford, Virginia, the second of 12 children. In addition to living in poverty, Swain grew up seeing her father abuse her mother. “My family was the poorest of the poor,” she said in an interview with Live Action News. “For the early part of my life, I lived in a two-room shack with no indoor plumbing, and in the wintertime, there was inadequate time to go to school. If it snowed, we stayed home. There were no toiletries, no deodorant, no sanitary napkins, nothing like that. We had to heat water in a pot on the stove to bathe in. And it was just… a really bad existence.”<\/p>\n

Because of this, Dr. Swain endured a great deal of bullying. “I was teased a lot as a child; they talked about bullying and shaming, and when you’re poor like that, you get a lot of shaming for things like that \u2014 not having sanitary napkins, using rags, things leak,” she said. “But through it all, I knew I was different. I always had a sense of urgency of something I was supposed to do.”<\/p>\n