Christine Callahan, of Middletown, supports abortion rights. A member of the state delegation at the convention, she sees Sarah Palin as a good fit with McCain.

ST. PAUL, Minn. — Thirty-year-old Andrea Coletta finds her deep antipathy to abortion in the Bible that she carried into yesterday morning’s meeting of the Rhode Island delegation to the Republican National Convention.

Christine Callahan, a self-described “John Chafee Republican” who came of age before Roe v. Wade, found her equally staunch belief in abortion rights through the harrowing experiences of young friends who risked their health to end their pregnancies in illegal clinics.

The two women have taken very different paths to St. Paul, but they agree on one point: Republican presidential candidate John McCain made a fine decision when he selected the running mate whose acceptance speech will rivet the nation’s attention tonight.

Callahan and Coletta insist, moreover, that the controversy over the pregnancy of Sarah Palin’s 17-year-old daughter has done nothing to dim their admiration of how the Alaska governor is handling her sudden arrival on the national stage. Quite the contrary, said Callahan.

Though she has no illusions about McCain’s chances in Democratic Rhode Island, Coletta personifies the excitement that Palin has sparked in religious conservatives, a crucial Republican voting bloc that has had a hard time warming up to the veteran Arizona senator. Callahan, for her part, sees Palin as validating her view that the maverick McCain is uniquely qualified to defy convention and partisanship to get the nation’s business done.

Coletta had never heard of Sarah Palin until about six weeks ago when she got an e-mail invitation to meet the Alaska governor at a reception for antiabortion activists at this week’s convention.

It didn’t take the 30-year-old businesswoman a lot of Internet research to decide that Palin had the kind of appeal that had spurred Coletta to make her first foray into politics, as a Rhode Island delegate for presidential candidate Mike Huckabee, the onetime Arkansas governor who wears his Christian conservatism on his sleeve.

Last Friday, Coletta learned — in an e-mail from the pastor of her nondenominational Christian church in the North End of Providence — that McCain selected Palin as his running mate. “I started Googling and You-Tubing and I watched her speech online and I was elated,” Coletta said — referring to Palin’s debut at McCain’s side in an appearance in Dayton, Ohio. “I had a very big smile on my face.”

Coletta said she runs her own business as a “middleman” who helps manufacturers sell high-end household goods to retail stores.

Political veteran Callahan said, “I grew up in an age when abortion was illegal and I’ve never forgotten it.” A mother of two grown children who served for 17 years as a state representative from Middletown, Callahan said that when she was an undergraduate at the University of Georgia, one of her friends traveled to Mexico to get an abortion. “Those were very perilous times for young women who found themselves in unwanted pregnancies,” Callahan said.

Roe v. Wade, the landmark Supreme Court ruling that opened the door to legal abortion a generation ago, “took the procedure out of the back alleys and made it safe for women,” Callahan said.

But Callahan, who is the chief financial officer of the state Bridge and Turnpike Authority, said, “the Republican Party is much broader than the choice issue.” She said her biggest voting issue this year is the weakened economy; McCain’s fiscally conservative approach, she argues, is the only way to turn it around.

In that regard, Callahan sees Palin as a good complement to McCain — on policy as well as election-year politics. She takes at face value the McCain campaign’s assertion that it checked her background carefully before Palin was selected.

“I think she’s going to help the ticket,” and not only because of her socially conservative traits, Callahan said. “She’s an outdoorswoman, she’s an outsider, she’ll be willing to take on Washington.” Callahan also praised Palin for having chosen “to bring a Down syndrome baby into the world.”

Coletta said she is very sensitive to the possibility that some voters will see hypocrisy in religious conservatives who, on the one hand, urge chastity outside of marriage and, on the other, insist that abortion amounts to the taking of human life.

“I hate to say it, but we have a very selfish society,” Coletta said. “It’s all about ‘me.’ ”

She said abortion is not the only issue that bears out her view, but it is the most important one. She argued that abortion-rights supporters often argue on behalf of rape and incest victims who represent a small fraction of pregnancies. Too often, she said, “It’s all about personal comfort and convenience when women make that decision” to abort “the life of a person, a child, a baby in the womb.”

Coletta said she feels for women who bear the brunt of an unplanned pregnancy “when the father has left, when there’s not enough money.” Churches are falling far short of providing the help such women need, she said. But “whatever the reason is going to be,” Coletta said she believes abortion is always the wrong thing to do.

As for 17-year-old Bristol Palin, Coletta — who is single — said she understands that a commitment to sexual abstinence is “hard, very hard.” But the right response in this case, she suggested, is tolerance.

Coletta, like other religious conservatives in the Rhode Island delegation, said she has been struck this week by the power of feeling at home in a large group of “like-minded” fellow citizens from around the country — not a sensation she has very often in Rhode Island.

Callahan said her fondest hope for tonight is that her 33-year-old daughter, an accountant who lives in Australia and still considers herself a Republican, will tune into Palin’s speech. “Any woman wants to be able to do what Sarah Palin is doing — as Hillary says, shatter the glass ceiling,” Callahan said. She was referring, of course, to the Democratic senator from New York who fell short in her campaign for the presidency this year.

jmulligan@belo-dc.com