Conversion stories are usually beautiful and poignant where someone embraces liberating truth. Sometimes, sadly, the story of transformation is because of capitulation to a blatant lie. Unfortunately, for “Reverend” Rob Schenck, his change is the latter. The former pro-life activist penned a poorly written defense of abortion on the pages of the nation’s leader of fake news, The New York Times.
In his piece, “I Was an Anti-Abortion Crusader. Now I Support Roe v. Wade,” he says that overturning Roe “should not be anybody’s idea of victory.”
Killing over 60 million innocent human beings since 1973 and harming countless mothers and fathers, via abortion, shouldn’t be anybody’s idea of victory, “Reverend” Schenck.
This is the most ignorant promotion of evil I've seen from someone who clearly knows what he's peddling is poison. Imagine the equally incoherent Op-Ed title: “I Was Once an Anti-Slavery Crusader. Now I Support Dred Scott v. Sanford.”
His pro-abortion rhetoric is nothing new; it’s just rehashed “pro-choice” activism that never remedies what it decries. I noticed he put “baby killing” in quotes and fails to explain why he says “abortion is a tragedy.” I've actually worked in impoverished neighborhoods ravaged by violence, poverty, crime and hopelessness. I can guarantee you the solution is never more death.
Child abuse is a tragedy. Several of my siblings experienced horrific abuse at the hands of their biological parents. But they were not better off dead. They were better off loved.
In Schenck’s pro-abortion screed, he wrote: “I can no longer pretend that telling poor pregnant women they have just one option — give birth and try your luck raising a child, even though the odds are stacked against you — is ‘pro-life’ in any meaningful sense.” With these words, he completely negates the work of thousands of pregnancy centers that provide compassionate care, material resources and invaluable life-skills training for mothers, for years, after the child’s birth.
He says he worked to fight Roe for 30 years, yet adoption never made its way into his lexicon?
I was conceived in rape yet adopted and loved. I’m an adoptive father. I was not better off dead. My children were not better off dead. Did Schenck ever extend his family and his resources to a vulnerable child in foster care or to an expectant mother who wanted a better life for her child?
Churches are the biggest funders of pregnancy centers and outreaches to the poor. He ignores this and the work of the Salvation Army, Operation Blessing, Catholic Charities, and Samaritan’s Purse. Apparently, he’s never visited phenomenal anti-poverty, pro-family, pro-life ministries like People for People in Philly, Bartow Family Resources in Cartersville, Georgia, or the Jericho Partnership in Danbury, Connecticut. The incredible people in these places do the work he claims pro-lifers don’t do.
But it’s easy to pretend that hope and help don’t exist. It somehow assuages his unjustifiable conversion.
I’m sorry, too, he thinks less of his “status” of being a white man. I thank God for white male legislators (and everyone else) who fight injustice. I thank God for those “upper class white men” who abolished the “tragedy” of slavery so that I’m not on some auction block here in northern Virginia today. Many women work legislatively, like African-American Rep. Katrina Jackson (D-Louisiana), to end abortion. The majority of those leading America’s pro-life organizations are women, but they don’t fit into Schenck’s tragic and tired narrative.
Fighting for what’s right, though, knows no gender, socio-economic status, or “race.” Frederick Douglass started his own newspaper, the North Star, because mainstream media advocated for slavery, refusing to tell the truth about the dehumanizing institution. The same situation exists today, as the majority of mainstream media “journalists" have chosen advocacy over accuracy, opinion over objectivity, and feelings over facts. The motto of Douglass’ liberating paper was: “Right is of no Sex—Truth is of no Color—God is the Father of us all, and we are all brethren.”
Brethren shouldn’t lie to each other or advocate for the destruction of one another.
Schenck has decided to try to snuff out Truth and millions of lives along with it.
His Op-Ed concludes: “Passing extreme anti-abortion laws and overturning Roe will leave poor women desperate and the children they bear bereft of what they need to flourish.”
I flourished because of those people he calls “fools”—prolife parents who believe that every human life has purpose. They put their faith in action like millions of other prolifers do every single day.
Roe doesn’t eliminate poverty. It doesn’t erase desperation. And you can’t flourish if you’re never born.
Roe never empowered women; it empowered men to have sex and run. Men are encouraged to abandon the situation. Fatherless families create vulnerable communities which are, in turn, devastated by the consequences of father absence: higher poverty rates, higher crime rates, higher drug usage, higher abortion rates, higher school drop-outs, higher incarceration rates.
I noticed he also never mention the hundreds of women killed, since Roe, by botched abortions and the millions physically, emotionally, and psychologically harmed by the rampant daily violence. Abortion is fake health that significantly increases risk of preterm births (one of the leading causes of infant mortality), triple-negative breast cancer and negative mental health outcomes.
Schenck claims he’s talking about “reality” while dismissing so much of it.
It’s not his former allies he needs to worry about. We’ll keep on doing the hard work of loving people (regardless of what decision they make) and sacrificially providing what those in crisis need to rise above. We’ll keep defending every human life made in the image of God, born and unborn. We’ll keep proving, in a Philippians 4:13 way, that we’re all stronger than our circumstances. It’s the God of Justice that the “Reverend” will have to explain his broken view of humanity to one day.
Ryan Bomberger is the Co-Founder of The Radiance Foundation and is an adoptee and adoptive father.