Why the C.E.O. Behind Match.com and Tinder Took a Stand on the Texas Abortion Law
AUSTIN — It’s the third Friday of November.
It’s also the day a national celebrity announces he’s leaving his first company to be a full-time pro-life champion.
It’s also the day a local woman named Amber who lives in central Texas takes the first steps toward having an abortion, just as she has done several times before.
So far, no one has heard of her.
Except a woman named Amber who lives in the small town of Atascosa.
Amber is a tiny, hard-up woman who has already lost one baby. She is also the C.E.O. of a company called Match.com. And as an engineer with a degree in computer science, she can’t stop thinking about a future she can’t yet see: being single, raising her kids in a stable, loving home, and giving them a better life than she’s been able to give them.
If she isn’t a single mom, she’s not a pro-life activist, she’s not on the front lines, or on the front lines of any movement for reproductive access at this moment in history.
Yet Amber stands there, her head tilted up in the bright Texas October sunlight, and she tells me why the founder of Match.com and the chief marketing officer of Tinder are now doing what they are, why they are standing up for the right to life of every child born.
We had been talking at a local coffee shop for three hours. I had seen Amber twice before, but never talked to her.
And we had already talked a lot about life before I even had a chance to hear her tell me why she’s so committed to the movement for a woman’s right to choose.
I wanted to know whether she shared the same goals we were sharing. I asked about her future plans and who she was trying to help, and I wanted to connect with her on an emotional level; if we were both in the same place at the same time, I wanted to know where I should be standing — the same place she is standing.
We talked about how