Who is Charmaine Yoest?

We reported in our News Highlights today that Charmaine Yoest, former president and CEO of Americans United for Life, will become a top communications official at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Pro-life leaders cheered that news, but many of our readers probably know nothing of her background. Here’s an excerpt from an interview I did with her that WORLD Magazine published five years ago:

In high school you were both a National Merit Finalist and a cheerleader, an unusual combination. My family emphasized academics, but I really enjoyed being out under the Friday night lights.

Second unusual combination: Gaining a Ph.D. while bringing up five children. I did graduate seminars at the University of Virginia two days a week—often a three-hour class in the evening—so it took a long time. My adviser was very supportive of my being a mother: I feared that my academic scholarship would be cut off, because you’re supposed to finish a Ph.D. in seven years, but he went to the dean and said, “She’s making good progress—you should allow her to take a longer time to do it.”

Third item: Two-and-a-half years ago you were diagnosed with breast cancer, so you were taking chemotherapy and lost your hair, and your husband and two sons all went bald. That’s a moment in my life I’ll never forget. I always had chemo on Thursdays so those were bad days. I’d come home from the hospital and be in bed asleep. I remember waking up and I didn’t have my contacts in so I couldn’t see really well, and all of a sudden these three bald heads come into the room.

How are you? I’m doing well. God’s been really gracious. I had tremendous doctors and remarkable support from my family.

This gets me thinking about an analogy. For decades we’ve been hearing about “cures” for cancer: Someone would make a discovery and the problem would go away. What’s developed instead has been an incremental approach: Little by little, people have found ways to fight various kinds of cancer, to extend lives. We haven’t found a universal cure, but the success rate is much, much higher than it was a generation ago and millions of lives have been saved. You can see where I’m going with this. I’ve never had anyone make that analogy, but it is a good one, and let me draw it out. Our culture needs to get used to the idea of a world without Roe v. Wade. We have to help people move along. We focus on parental notification, informed consent, bans on partial-birth abortion, clinic regulations: These are all approaches to abortion that the vast majority of the American people support. When you pass these kinds of legislation, you can dramatically reduce the rate of abortion in a state. If I can go and talk with a mother who flat-out disagrees with me about abortion as a whole, but she doesn’t want her daughter being taken for an abortion—a major medical procedure—without her knowing about it, we can establish a connection and make a difference.

The pro-life movement 20 years ago moved away from an all-or-nothing position that wasn’t accomplishing much—a constitutional amendment to ban abortion, or nothing—to an all-or-something position: We’d like an amendment but we can’t get it now, so let’s save as many lives as we can. We’ve already established that I’m a football fan, and my 16-year-old son is a quarterback, so I’ll mix metaphors: Sometimes you go for that “long bomb” pass, but you’ve got to get those 10 yards for a first down, so a lot of times it’s a ground game of moving that ball relentlessly down the field. Our goal is a touchdown, but you get it by moving the ball little by little.