(The following was originally a Facebook comment.)

by Rod D. Martin
September 26, 2012

Please don’t be too hard on these mothers. You’re certainly correct in what you’re saying, but the sad reality is that far too many of these women are really just scarred little girls, frequently forced and all of them lied too.

No one thinks of this side of it: folks on our side rightly feel as you do, and folks on the other side want to keep things sunny and talk about “wanted children” and “choice” rather than the actual ugly facts.

But when pro-lifers in South Dakota attempted (and succeeded, briefly) to get their state legislature to ban abortion outright — hoping the Supreme Court would take the case and overturn Roe — they took this un-taken approach and put before the legislative committees over 200 women who’d actually had an abortion. Most of them — even 30 years later — suffer from some form of PTSD. They wake up in the middle of the night screaming. Some have been unable to work for most of their lives, consumed with grief. Large percentages testified through tears that they had been taken to the abortionist by someone they trusted who lied to them about what was going to happen: a boyfriend, a father, in many cases an incestuous father or a many-years-older boyfriend of an underage girl. A significant number had been raped repeatedly, impregnated repeatedly, and aborted repeatedly, more or less at gunpoint by these older abusive men. Not one of the women who testified, whether coerced or not, said she would do it again.

An almost unanimous state legislature — both parties, both houses — voted to ban abortion. Only by skulduggery was this overturned. But we are working hard to get this testimony before the Supreme Court, and we believe we may have just won the key Appeals Court ruling necessary to clear the way for exactly that.

Abortion is evil. It is murder for profit and for selfishness. But the “self” is frequently not the woman herself, and even when it is, she frequently survives in a world where she’s no longer able to have children, or at the very least saddled with the immensity of the realization of her guilt. Frequently this makes these women militants, desperate to cover for and justify what they’ve done: I don’t think it’s an accident that the number of women who’ve had an abortion in this country is pretty similar to the number of women who self-identify Democrat. But just as often, these women are tragic afterthoughts of someone else’s agenda: a husband, a boyfriend, a father, Planned Parenthood, anyone but their child. They are perhaps more than any among us to be pitied, and if Saul of Tarsus could be redeemed after his complicity in Stephen’s murder, we must do our best here to show these women Christ’s love, and help them use their unique testimonies to bring light to the world and an end to this holocaust.

 

Rod D. Martin is a leading futurist, technology entrepreneur, author and activist from Destin, Florida. He was part of PayPal’s pre-IPO startup team, serving as special counsel to founder and CEO Peter Thiel, and also served as policy director to former Governor Mike Huckabee. He is Founder and CEO of The Martin Organization, whose portfolio of companies includes Galectin Therapeutics (NASDAQ: GALT), Advanced Search Laboratories, Proxomo Software, Agincourt Ventures and the 10 X Fund.  His charitable and church work is central to all he does, and he further engages our culture as President of the National Federation of Republican Assemblies (NFRA), as founder of The Vanguard Project, as a widely sought-after speaker and as author of such books as his forthcoming The Imperative of Excellence.