Radical Womanhood

'The Clogs and Destroyers of Civilization'

(Another book chapter finished! Yay! Here's an unedited excerpt that ties in with the current focus on abortion. I look forward to your feedback. I've opened the comments function; comments are moderated.)

Margaret Sanger was the founder of the modern birth control movement and a vocal proponent of eugenics—the theory of race improvement that was the cornerstone of Nazi Germany. Sanger believed that all evils stemmed from large families, especially large families of those she deemed as unfit. As she wrote in her 1920 book, Woman and the New Race, “The most merciful thing that a large family does to one of its infant members is to kill it.”

I can’t even fathom saying such a thing, but Sanger’s personal history undoubtedly influenced her thinking. She was born in 1879 in Corning, New York, the sixth of eleven surviving children. Her father was a stonemason and a supporter of radical socialist causes. Sanger’s mother succumbed to tuberculosis at 49. Sanger later said the strain of 18 pregnancies was what broke her mother’s health. 

Sanger went on to study nursing and married in 1902. Her first pregnancy was a difficult one that landed her in a sanitarium for her confinement and recovery. But she regained her health and gave birth to two more children. In 1910, she began to work as a midwife and home nurse on the Lower East Side of New York City. A year later, she joined a radical labor movement and participated in several labor strikes.

By 1912, Sanger began writing a series of articles on female sexuality and contraception in the socialist publication, The Call, in bold defiance of then-current law against the dissemination of information on sexually transmitted diseases and contraception. Two years later, separated from her husband whom she would later divorce, she founded the monthly magazine, Woman Rebel, under the slogan, “No gods; no masters!”  In 1914, she fled to Europe after she was indicted for violating U.S. postal obscenity laws. But two years later, having avoided imprisonment, she was back in the U.S. to open the nation’s first birth control clinic, in Brooklyn, New York. After ten days of operation, she was arrested and jailed. The trial made her a national figure, and handed doctors the right to prescribe birth control advice.

In 1921, Sanger organized the American Birth Control League, which later became the Planned Parenthood Federation of America. For Sanger, the birth control movement was founded on two goals: limiting the reproduction of the “unfit” and challenging Christian teaching by creating a “new morality.” She campaigned against women “with staggering rapidity” breeding “those numberless, undesired children who become the clogs and the destroyers of civilization.”  Sanger’s scorched-earth writing left no one guessing about her views:

While unknowingly laying the foundations of tyrannies and providing the human tinder for racial conflagrations, woman was also unknowingly creating slums, filling asylums with insane, and institutions with other defectives. She was replenishing the ranks of the prostitutes, furnishing grist for the criminal courts and inmates for prisons. Had she planned deliberately to achieve this tragic total of human waste and misery, she could hardly have done it more effectively. 

[T]he most urgent problem to-day is how to limit and discourage the over-fertility of the mentally and physically defective. Possibly drastic and Spartan methods may be forced upon American society if it continues complacently to encourage the chance and chaotic breeding that has resulted from our stupid, cruel sentimentalism. 

She was equally as caustic about Christianity and the Bible’s teaching on sexuality:

Let it be realized that this creation of new sex ideals is a challenge to the church. Being a challenge to the church, it is also, in less degree, a challenge to the state. The woman who takes a fearless stand for the incoming sex ideals must expect to be assailed by reactionaries of every kind. Imperialists and exploiters will fight hardest in the open, but the ecclesiastic will fight longest in the dark. He understands the situation best of all; he knows what reaction he has to fear from the morals of women who have attained liberty. For, be it repeated, the church has always known and feared the spiritual potentialities of woman’s freedom.

When women have raised the standards of sex ideals and purged the human mind of its unclean conception of sex, the fountain of the race will have been cleansed. Mothers will bring forth, in purity and in joy, a race that is morally and spiritually free.

I think it’s safe to say that with the perspective of nearly a century of hindsight, we have hardly attained a cleansed human race that is morally and spiritually free. To expect this kind of salvation from women is unwise, unbiblical, and downright impossible. As we will see in a following chapter, women did not manage to raise the sex standard—in fact, third-wave feminism gave rise to the feminine “raunch culture” we live in today. Yet, Sanger was so confident about the fruits of birth control and the new race that she predicted exactly the opposite of what has come to pass:

When motherhood becomes the fruit of a deep yearning, not the result of ignorance or accident, its children will become the foundation of a new race. There will be no killing of babies in the womb by abortion, nor through neglect in foundling homes, nor will there be infanticide. . . .

The relentless efforts of reactionary authority to suppress the message of birth control and of voluntary motherhood are futile. The powers of reaction cannot now prevent the feminine spirit from breaking its bonds. When the last fetter falls the evils that have resulted from the suppression of woman’s will to freedom will pass. Child slavery, prostitution, feeblemindedness, physical deterioration, hunger, oppression and war will disappear from the earth. . . . When the womb becomes fruitful through the desire of an aspiring love, another Newton will come forth to unlock further the secrets of the earth and the stars. There will come a Plato who will be understood, a Socrates who will drink no hemlock, and a Jesus who will not die upon the cross. (emphasis added)

God forbid. God forbid!

I type that quote with tears on my cheeks. Without the cross, we are doomed. There is no hope of a new heavens and a new earth, free from the effects of the fall, without the atonement of our sinless Savior. There is no hope for mercy to triumph over judgment unless it be at the foot of that cross. There is no hope for “child slavery, prostitution, feeblemindedness, physical deterioration, hunger, oppression and war to disappear from the earth” if the Father’s righteous anger against these terrible sins is not satisfied. Where would justice be in the universe if such sins go overlooked? No, on the contrary, our only hope is the cross! If Jesus had not been obedient to this plan of salvation, who could possibly be our mediator?

And who could possibly atone for the slaughter that eventually arose from this “new morality”?

Margaret Sanger lived to see the development of the first birth control pill in 1960—something she had worked toward. She died in 1966, the year the Johnson administration incorporated “family planning” into its foreign policy and domestic health and social welfare programs of the United States.  Her life bridged the first and second waves of feminism, but her philosophies were the booster rocket for the most profound effects of second-wave feminism.

The Silent Scream

In 1984, the man who two decades earlier had co-founded the leading pro-abortion group (NARAL), released the startling documentary, The Silent Scream. In this video, Dr. Bernard Nathanson, who once ran the nation's largest abortion clinic and claims he was personally responsible for 75,000 abortions, provides a clinical and dispassionate abortion presentation. The reason he did this was to show, for the first time, what abortion looks like through ultrasound technology. For it was through this technological development that Dr. Nathanson came to understand the evils of abortion and to repudiate his former support for it.

Until yesterday, I had never seen this video. In 1984, when it was released, I was a feminist, ardently pro-choice, and graduating with a degree in journalism and a certificate in women's studies. Obviously, I was deaf to anything from the pro-life camp. I first heard about this video when I became a Christian nearly ten years later. But even when I was training a few years after that to be a mentor in my local crisis pregnancy center, I still didn't see it.

Last night, as I was researching this topic for my book, I found The Silent Scream on YouTube and decided to watch it. It's quite disturbing--made more so, possibly, because the low production values of 1980s video offer no visual hype. It's just relentless fact after relentless fact as Dr. Nathanson calmly shows an abortion through ultrasound technology. Very grim viewing.

Even so, as I am researching this topic, I can see God's sovereign hand working in the course of human history. I had assumed that widespread abortion was something that arose in my lifetime. But in my book research, I've found that it's been a problem since the beginning of time. And as a percentage of the population, the abortion rates of the mid-19th century match the recent abortion rates of our times. (This fact courtesy of Marvin Olasky's sobering book, Abortion Rites.) But God (two of the kindest words in the Bible!) -- but God keeps intervening. I am astounded that abortion proponents like Norma McCorvey (the "Roe" in Roe v. Wade) and Dr. Nathanson were suddenly arrested by the truth, did an about-face, and became pro-life activists. And even as abortion became legal in 1973, scientists were working on ultrasound technology; the first ultrasound machine became commercially available just three years later. 

There are a lot of problems with YouTube--from content population to copyright issues--but I am grateful for the way it provides an open-access platform for videos such as The Silent Scream to live on in cyberspace. I've embedded a link to the low-res, slightly out-of-sync full video below. It's not for the squeamish, but this is a critical piece of film-making. You'll never find a topic like it on the growing number of health or plastic surgery television shows, but it is important viewing. 

(UPDATE: Please pray for new legislation in Florida this week concerning abortion. Details are in the comment below that I cleared for the purpose of soliciting your intercession.)

Parasitic Pregnancy?

Sometimes the "thinking" in certain pockets of our culture leaves me speechless. Even though I'm researching this topic right now, I remain stunned about where the pro-abortion movement is heading. Here, from yesterday's Boundless article, is the latest jaw-dropper:

Flash back a decade or so, when a professor named Eileen McDonagh put out a book called Breaking the Abortion Deadlock.

McDonagh didn't bother to deny that a fetus is a person. Instead, she argued that a fetus is, in effect, a criminal — a "powerful intruder" guilty of "kidnapping" a woman and holding her hostage for nine months — and thus could be dispatched like any violent assailant. "The fetus is not innocent," she wrote, "but instead aggressively intrudes on a woman's body so massively that deadly force is justified to stop it."

Reaching for analogies, McDonagh compared an unborn child to a rapist. You can't expect a woman to endure a pregnancy to support her assailant, she said: "This type of reasoning is akin to saying that a woman being raped should wait till the rape is over rather than stopping the rapist." And you can't protest that the preborn child has no malicious intent: Neither would a mentally incompetent rapist, McDonagh argued, but you still have the right to shoot him.

Though some feminist groups (the National Organization for Women among them) leaders hailed the book, few others raced to embrace it. To all but the most radical feminists, talking as if the unborn child were The Enemy is, in a word, bizarre. No one seemed to talk about the book for long, and I, for one, figured not much would come of it.

Read what happened next in "Intruder Alert." Then please pray for those who advocate such a heinous idea.

Abortion Changes You

One of the most challenging--and gratifying--elements of working on my book is interviewing the women who have agreed to share their personal stories. I'm now in the process of working on the chapter about motherhood, which features numerous testimonies from women with a wide variety of parenting stories . . . including deeply painful admissions of abortion. This is a painful topic, even for women who know they have been forgiven because of the atoning sacrifice of Jesus Christ for their sins. I have sat and cried with women as they spoke of the challenges of adoption or infertility or caring for ill children. But I have seen profound remorse from women who aborted a child. The women I interviewed were not Christians at the time of their abortions and they have given birth to other children--two situations that create terrible clarity in hindsight. They have repented and know they have been forgiven of their sins because of the lavish mercy of the cross, but grief can still wash over them unexpectedly.

So I can only imagine what it would be like without the knowledge of grace and forgiveness, and the support of a Bible-believing church. What do you do with all the hurt that our culture ignores? How do you process grief when abortion is viewed as a political platform? Where do you go if you are a man and your child was aborted without your consent? How do you handle your emotions when your grandchild, niece, or sibling is aborted?

These questions are some of what drive the non-political online outreach, Abortion Changes You. It's a tool to begin a conversation about post-abortive grief.  I say "begin" because this site does not overtly present the gospel. There are a variety of personal stories posted, some of which are theologically accurate and some not. But it is a start, a bridge to the millions who have discovered that abortion is not a "quick fix" for the pregnancy they terminated. I pray the Lord will use it not only to reach those with post-abortive grief, but also for those who are searching for information about abortion. May numerous women come across this site when searching for abortion referrals.

'I Was Adopted, Not Aborted'

The Holocaust. Rwanda. Darfur. Three terrible examples of horrific slaughter with millions of lives lost. The reasons are almost inexplicable--one day a group of people decided that another group did not deserve to live.

In our own nation, we have lost millions in the same way. One group has decided it has the right to terminate the life of another. We have a generation that is missing 48 million people, killed before they could be born. But alive, they most definitely were. That argument is fully supported by medical science.

Whenever the topic of abortion is defended, only the interests of one half of one side are addressed: the mother's. (Paternal interests are often dismissed, too.) But in the 35 years since Roe v. Wade, a generation has come to maturity who can speak to the loss from the other side.

Four of those young adults are marching today in D.C. They were each adopted, two from Russia, one from Romania, and one from D.C. I interviewed their adoptive mother for my book. We'll call her Marty Terrill. (Because some of the stories in my book are quite sensitive, I've decided to change all the names of those I interviewed for the sake of privacy.)

Lucas Terrill was adopted from Romania. His birth mother was in her fifth month of pregnancy, about to get an abortion. But one night, she had a dream in which she was told, "Don't abort the boy." She didn't know the sex of her child, but the dream sobered her enough that she immediately canceled the abortion and decided to give him up for adoption.

Lucas was two years old in 1992 when Marty took him to his first March for Life in Washington, D.C. "As we walked, we encountered a whole section of pro-abortion feminists," Marty recalls. "They were angry and antagonistic about the rally. So I stepped up, holding Lucas and said, 'I adopted him. Look at him! He could have been aborted.' I assumed they were be affected by this cute little boy, but it didn't affect them one bit. They shouted expletives in return. I was horrified by their reaction."

Lucas and his siblings have attended every March for Life since then, carrying signs saying, "I was adopted, not aborted." Often they are applauded. Sometimes they are jeered. In one recent march, Marty was confronted by a group of self-proclaimed atheists who yelled at her for bringing her children, accusing her of forcing them to come and carry these signs. Lucas immediately stepped up and corrected them, saying he wanted to come: "I believe in this. My life was spared! I definitely want to be here."

Then he witnessed to them, sharing the good news of Jesus' life, death, and resurrection.

"I think for my kids it's very meaningful to be in this march," Marty says. "They've seen the pictures of the babies who were aborted. They are very aware of how they were spared. So we all want to stand up for other children in the same situation, where their mothers could choose to kill them instead of allowing them to live. I always say to my kids, 'Your moms were poor and didn't have the money to take care of you. They could have aborted you, but they didn't. You can thank your birth moms that they went through labor and gave you birth.'

"Every one of my adopted kids could have been aborted. But their birth mothers all chose life and gave me the chance to adopt them. God says we need to stand up for life. The Bible says we are to cry out for those who can't cry out for themselves--and that's what we're doing."

UPDATE: The headline in The Washington Post's report the next day concurs with this perspective, "A Youthful Throng Marches Against Abortion." Quote from a 17-year-old from Dallas: "This is the social justice issue of our era, and I want to do something about it."

(Photos: The Washington Post)

UK Public Opinion Shifting Against Abortion

Google alerts are a great research tool. I've got one set up now to track what's being published online on the topic of feminism. That's how I came across this stunning analysis from a U.K. columnist for The Daily Mail. Titled "Why I, As a Feminist, Abhor How the Abortion Law Has Been So Abused," Amanda Platell writes:

In 1969, the first full year that abortion became legal in Britain, there were just under 55,000 terminations carried out.

Last year, there were more than 214,000 - the highest rate of abortion of any European nation, and equivalent to a population the size of a city such as Coventry.

Of these, just one per cent were carried out on the grounds that the unborn child was feared to be handicapped.

Yet it is only when you put these totals into perspective that you get a full sense of the scale of the matter: astonishingly, one in every four babies conceived in Britain today will be aborted. One in four!

The figures are all the more remarkable when you consider how advances in medical science have changed our perspective of the child in the womb.

We now know, for example, that almost 40per cent of babies born at 24 weeks - the current upper limit - can survive outside the womb.

We know that as early as 13 weeks, a foetus appears to yawn and rub their eyes; that at 15 weeks, they gain a sense of taste; that at 18 weeks they begin to hear.

Who now can look at those images taken recently of a 23-week-old foetus in the womb, sucking its thumb and playing with its toes, and not shudder at the inadequacy of the current abortion legislation?

Who could read those statistics about the sheer scale of abortion in Britain today and not question the morality behind it?

Well, a lot of people in government, it seems.

Later this year, the Human Tissue and Embryos Bill comes before Parliament, in which the entire 1967 Abortion Act - 40 years old next month - will be open to amendment.

Astonishingly, rather than using the opportunity to tighten up the law to take account of the huge social and medical changes that have taken place since then, the pro-abortion lobby hope to use the Bill to relax the legislation yet further.

Please pray for this bill and for those yet to be born in the U.K. According to this column, public opinion has changed substantially on the topic of abortion:

What makes these proposals as wrong-headed as they are unwarranted is that they coincide with a huge and hitherto unrecognised seachange in public opinion.

For the overwhelming evidence is that the vast majority of people in Britain now want abortion to be made not easier, but more difficult to obtain.

A staggering body of research to be unveiled tomorrow shows that 68 per cent of people in this country want to make abortion law tougher and reduce the upper limit from 24 weeks to around 13 weeks.

Fifty-five per cent believe there are too many abortions and want the Government to take steps to reduce that number.

And the most unexpected aspect of the research is that it is women, not men, who are the most militant in seeking change.

Seventy-two per cent of women think the abortion limit should be almost halved from the present limit, to around 13 weeks.

So just as it was women who lobbied so hard in the Fifties and early Sixties for the right to have their voice heard on abortion, now it is women who are lobbying for the law to be tightened up.

Like me, they fear the pendulum has swung too far in favour of women's rights and disastrously away from the rights of an unborn child.

HT: 168 Hours

"I Wasn't Aborted"

I can't believe I read such a cogent article about the high price of abortion in the Wall Street Journal's editorial page. I applaud the editorial board for including this piece by a woman who grew up in the Soviet-era of common abortions--and was almost aborted herself. Here's how it starts:

The Web site of Ms. Magazine--yes, it still exists--is calling on readers to sign a petition: "I have had an abortion. I publicly join the millions of women in the United States who have had an abortion in demanding a repeal of laws that restrict women's reproductive freedom."

Well, so much for the right to privacy. If Ms. readers hadn't had so many abortions, there might be more Ms. readers. As for the rest of us, here's a petition we could all sign: "I wasn't aborted."

Having narrowly escaped being aborted, I'd be the first in line.

Like most Soviet-era fetuses conceived in Russia by couples who were already parents, I was scheduled for abortion as a matter of course. In a society where abortion was the only form of birth control, it wasn't uncommon to meet women who had double-digit abortion counts. Often a couple would schedule the appointment before they even stopped to remember that they wanted a second child.

My husband, also a second-born, and I were lucky to have been two such afterthoughts, each brought into the world thanks to one of two parents' change of heart. (Actually it was Anya Isaakovna, my mother's usual at the public clinic, who sensed a tinge of reservation and kicked her out.) Coincidentally, both my husband and I were to be the third abortions, each of us having had two siblings who weren't so lucky, which unfortunately was lucky for us.

Not quite so for my parents. Life's turns dealt them a hand they couldn't have foreseen 30 years ago while aborting, an act that people living in a nation of miserables can't exactly be judged for. Indeed, among Soviet émigrés from the 1970s and '80s, it's very rare to see families with more than two children, the self-imposed quota among Russians of that wave. But in hindsight, as my mother said a few months after my newlywed elder sister and her husband died in a five-vehicle collision in 2000, had she known she would outlive one of her only two children, she would have had more.

To read the rest of this thoughtful article, visit "Petitioning for Life" on OpinionJournal.com.

(Pictured above: Julia Gorin, the author.)

Study Reveals Abortion Leads to Abuse

A new study confirms the violent link between abortion and child abuse. This study, published in the medical journal Acta Paediatrica, reported that women who have had an abortion are 2.4 times more likely to physically abuse their children than those who experienced a miscarriage or stillbirth.

The study, led by Priscilla Coleman of Bowling Green State University, tracked 518 low-income women in Baltimore, Md., who were receiving Aid to Families with Dependent Children and who had at least one child aged 12 years or younger. For further information, you can read LifeSiteNews.com's article summarizing the study or an absract from the journal itself.

Here is the timely insight of another researcher, Elliot Institute Director Dr. David Reardon: "The common perception seems to be that abortion solves the immediate problem of a crisis pregnancy and that therefore it must be a positive thing for women. However, more and more studies such as this one show that abortion can have a severe and lasting impact on women's lives, shaping their futures and the futures of their families for years to come."

Not to mention the severe and lasting impact on the aborted child.

Biological Clocks, Prenatal Testing, and Abortion

Concerned about the biological alarm clock? Here's a thoughtful article from today's Washington Post about "The Abortion Debate No One Wants to Have." The subhead for this piece is: "Prenatal testing is making your right to abort a disabled child more like 'your duty' to abort a disabled child." Frankly, I was surprised to read this perspective in the Post, as I think the author, Patricia Bauer, has raised a very good point even though she's not direct about her own views on abortion. She is the mother of a Down's Syndrome child named Margaret. I recommend reading the piece in its entirety, but here's an excerpt:

Many young women, upon meeting us, have asked whether I had "the test." I interpret the question as a get-home-free card. If I say no, they figure, that means I'm a victim of circumstance, and therefore not implicitly repudiating the decision they may make to abort if they think there are disabilities involved. If yes, then it means I'm a right-wing antiabortion nut whose choices aren't relevant to their lives.

Either way, they win.

In ancient Greece, babies with disabilities were left out in the elements to die. We in America rely on prenatal genetic testing to make our selections in private, but the effect on society is the same.

Margaret's old pediatrician tells me that years ago he used to have a steady stream of patients with Down syndrome. Not anymore. Where did they go, I wonder. On the west side of L.A., they aren't being born anymore, he says.

The irony is that we live in a time when medical advances are profoundly changing what it means to live with disabilities. Years ago, people with Down syndrome often were housed in institutions. Many were in poor health, had limited self-care and social skills, couldn't read, and died young. It was thought that all their problems were unavoidable, caused by their genetic anomaly.

Now it seems clear that these people were limited at least as much by institutionalization, low expectations, lack of education and poor health care as by their DNA. Today people with Down syndrome are living much longer and healthier lives than they did even 20 years ago. Buoyed by the educational reforms of the past quarter-century, they are increasingly finishing high school, living more independently and holding jobs.

Never having been pregnant, I want to speak humbly about the quagmire of prenatal counseling. No doubt there is some benefit in being prepared, but only if you could be certain the testing and the doctors were right. The doctors were terribly wrong about one of my wonderful, healthy, and bright nephews--and I know they've been wrong about many other children, too. As this article states, it seems the underlying worldview of the push for prenatal counseling is that of eugenics (the attempt to improve the human race by controlled selective breeding). No doubt discerning Christian women would be served to remember this when receiving the counsel of their doctors. For those of us whose biological clocks are going off, we should also remember these assumptions when we hear the buzzing in our ears. Even with our advances in medical testing and care, Psalm 139 is still God's truth for our bodies:

¹³For you formed my inward parts;
   you knitted me together in my mother's womb.
¹⁴I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.
Wonderful are your works;
   my soul knows it very well.
¹⁵My frame was not hidden from you,
when I was being made in secret,
   intricately woven in the depths of the earth.
¹⁶Your eyes saw my unformed substance;
in your book were written, every one of them,
   the days that were formed for me,
   when as yet there were none of them.

Reflections On Declining Abortion Rates

I was crunching through my high-fiber cereal this morning when I read an article that offered more good cheer than my morning coffee: abortion rates are declining. The Washington Post reported that the procedure is continuing its decade-long drop and stands at its lowest level since 1976. I put my spoon down and thanked God. Perhaps social pressures are accomplishing what the law has not.

Of course, one has to put this statement into perspective: we're still talking 1.29 million aborted pregnancies in 2002 (the year of most current data), down from 1.61 million in 1990. And that's an estimate, because not all states (including mine--Maryland) are required to report abortion statistics.

This data was collected by the Alan Guttmacher Institute, a nonprofit group that collects information from abortion providers and public sources. As the Post stated, "the institute's mission is to protect reproductive choice, but its reports are considered accurate across the political spectrum." Guttmacher produces its reports by contacting abortion providers nationwide.

As stated previously on this blog, I am a former feminist and I was ardently pro-abortion until I became a Christian at 30. I don't remember any of my women's studies professors or fellow feminists having a reasoned argument for abortion rights. I just remember that we didn't want any man telling us what to do with our bodies--nor did we want to live with the consequences of our sexual relationships. I'm not trying to sound like a talk-show screed, but it does fascinate me in hindsight that though we were highly concerned with our own freedoms, we weren't concerned about anyone else's. To take away legal abortions meant women were going to bleed to death at astronomical rates in alleys everywhere. No one thought about the females who were dying in utero (much less the males!). Nor did we foresee the effects of "disposable children" in the gruesome murders of children by their own family members (think: Susan Smith and her drowned children).

I wonder if I'd known then about Feminists for Life, if I would have thought more broadly about the situation. This isn't a wholesale endorsement of the group, but they do take an interesting position. Their mission statement is that women deserve better than abortion: "Abortion is a reflection that our society has failed to meet the needs of women. We are dedicated to systematically eliminating the root causes that drive women to abortion--primarily lack of practical resources and support--through holistic, woman-centered solutions." (There are reports, too, that the wife of the new Supreme Court nominee, John Roberts, was once the executive vice-president of Feminists for Life.)

I think they are right. Women do deserve better than abortion. And I wish more pro-abortion women knew about resources such as Christian pregnancy centers. I didn't know these centers even existed until I was introduced to my local pregnancy center through my church. Seeing faith and love in action like this helped to cement my new Christian convictions. But even more so, I wish women would understand they deserve better relationships with men, too. According to the Guttmacher report, women who accept a lack of commitment from men are the ones most likely to abort:

• Most abortions (67.3%) are obtained by never-married women. Married women account for a lower proportion of abortions (17%), in part because they have low rates of unintended pregnancy; those who do experience an unintended pregnancy are more likely than unmarried women to continue the pregnancy.
• About 25% of abortions occur among women living with a male partner to whom they are not married, although such women make up only about 10% of all women aged 15–44. This is a group at very high risk of unintended pregnancy and abortion.
• The proportion of unintended pregnancies terminated by abortion ranges from 65% among formerly-married women and 60% among never-married women to 37% among currently married women.

It's an odd freedom for women to choose to live without male commitment or support and maintain it through murder.

For further reading, check out Feminists for Life or the Guttmacher report .