William Norman Grigg

Sexual assault does not justify abortion, contends William Norman Grigg in the following viewpoint. Abortion only creates more trauma for victims of rape and incest—especially in cases involving teenage victims, who often develop strong feelings of attachment to their unborn children, reports Grigg. Moreover, he argues, all human life is sacred; the means by which a child is conceived should have no bearing on the worth of that child’s life. As support for his argument, Grigg discusses the case of Lee Ezell, a woman who became pregnant by rape as a teenager and gave the child up for adoption. This adoptee, who eventually became acquainted with her birth mother, now works on behalf of pregnant rape victims and their unborn children. Grigg is a senior editor for New American, a biweekly journal published by the John Birch Society.

As you read, consider the following questions:

1. According to Julie Makimaa, quoted by the author, how does the pro-abortion movement depict children of rape and incest"
2. In what way do Planned Parenthood counselors discourage pregnant girls from giving their children up for adoption, according to Grigg and Makimaa"
3. According to this viewpoint, how many unborn children have been destroyed by abortion"

According to a familiar legal axiom, hard cases make bad law. Abortion proponents have long capitalized upon the propaganda value of hard cases, such as pregnancies that result from rape and incest. By filtering the subject of abortion through the distorting lens of such situations, supporters of abortion on demand have exploited the sympathy of decent people to advance the notion that a child’s right to life is contingent upon the circumstances of his conception. However, as Dr. Charles Rice of the University of Notre Dame Law School observes, to allow for abortions in the “hard cases” is to say “that the question of which babies will be killed is negotiable.” Julie Makimaa is alive today because her mother, who became pregnant with Julie as a result of rape, understood that her child was a non-negotiable blessing.

“It doesn’t matter how I began,” explains Julie, who lives with her husband Bob and two teenage children in western Michigan. “What matters is who I will become.” Julie is the founder of Fortress International, which works on behalf of women who become pregnant through sexual assault and the children thus conceived. She has offered testimony to Congress, as well as state legislatures in Louisiana, South Carolina, Missouri, and Tennessee. Pro-life leaders in Ireland sought out Julie’s help during that nation’s debate over legalizing abortion. Julie has spoken before school, civic, church, and youth groups across the country, and appeared on numerous radio and television programs. Hers is an eloquent and compelling voice offering a message of hope in the context of the tragedy of sexual assault.

Each Child Is a Miracle

“One of the truly perverse things that the pro-abortion movement has done is to convince many people that the child conceived in rape can never have a worthwhile life,” Julie maintains. “The pro-abortion movement constantly depicts children of rape and incest as somehow defective, tainted, unwanted—almost as if we carry some evil gene predisposing us to anti-social behavior. While Christians certainly understand the reality of man’s sinful nature, we should also understand, as my birth mother did, that each child is a God-made miracle, and that this is true of children conceived in rape and incest.”

Julie has collaborated with Dave Reardon, author of the study Aborted Women: Silent No More, on a forthcoming book examining the “hard cases” of rape and incest. Drawing from the experiences of 264 women and children, the new study documents that “abortion does absolutely nothing to help women and girls who have been raped or suffered incestuous sexual assault,” she explains. “It is another violent act that compounds the problem. In spite of the fact that killing the child may offer a quick short-term solution, it does very serious long-term damage to the girl, as millions of women are now tragically learning.”

This damage is particularly pronounced in teenage victims of rape and incest who are lured into aborting their children. “Counselors for Planned Parenthood excel in preying upon the fears of troubled young girls who consider giving their children up for adoption,” Julie explains. “One of the favorite approaches used by Planned Parenthood counselors is to tell young girls, ‘Oh, there’s no one who could love your child the way that you do’ and then insist that somehow killing the child is a more compassionate alternative” than giving the baby up for adoption. Another favorite tactic, Julie continues, is to insist that “‘we can’t force these young girls to have babies.’ But people who recite that line refuse to address the fact that having teenagers kill their babies is much more traumatic. What we have found in our studies is that the younger the girls, the more attached they have become to their child. When they are pressured into having an abortion, their sense of vulnerability compounds the trauma; their sense of helplessness is magnified by their inability to protect their child.”

Shattered Dreams

Julie’s birth mother, Lee Ezell, was a teenager who became pregnant as the result of rape. The daughter of an abusive, alcoholic father, Lee fled Philadelphia for California in 1962. As a devout Christian she anticipated falling in love, raising a family, and living a “Doris Day life” with the man for whom she was saving herself. But Lee’s hopes received a brutal setback when an acquaintance at work, acting with pre-meditated malice, contrived a situation in which he could force himself upon her. The vile assault left the teenager wounded, confused, and pregnant. Compounding her problems was the fact that her alcoholic mother, who had also fled to California, reacted to Lee’s news by throwing her out of their home, telling her to “take care of it” and to “come back when it’s over.” Homeless, jobless, with only a few dollars in savings, Lee was “an unwanted child pregnant with an unwanted child,” she recalls in her book The Missing Piece.

Abortion Is No Solution to Rape

Why do some people believe abortion can be justified in the case of rape? Some people believe in good faith that when rape results in pregnancy, abortion can remove the painful evidence of that rape. But will it"

Will abortion erase the memory of the rape or heal the emotional and physical pain of the assault? Will abortion, in effect, erase the rape of a woman? Hardly. Rape is an act of violence inflicted upon a woman. She is an innocent victim, and this knowledge may someday help her to come to terms with the rape and rebuild her life. Abortion, on the other hand, is an act of violence that a mother inflicts on her own child. Through abortion, the mother becomes the aggressor, and this knowledge may haunt her long after she has dealt with the rape.

American Life League pamphlet, 1995.

Although the Roe v. Wade decision was years away, some of Lee’s friends were aware of women who had solved their “problems” by undergoing illegal abortion; this was probably what her mother had alluded to when she told Lee to “take care of” her child. One of her friends suggested that she repair to an abortuary in Mexico to “get rid of this thing I didn’t deserve.” But Lee knew that this would be wrong. “It seemed abortion was such a permanent solution to a temporary problem,” writes Lee. “I knew enough to know that one of God’s commandments was ‘Thou Shalt Not Kill.’ If I was really serious about letting God run my life, then this wasn’t an option.” Through her older sister’s intervention, Lee was able to arrange new living quarters with a relative. By immersing herself in prayer and Bible study, she was able to receive the strength and solace necessary to confront what seemed like an almost insurmountable challenge.

With God’s help, Lee was able to forgive those who had offended her, including her parents and her assailant. With the help of a supportive congregation in Los Angeles, she was drawn more deeply into Christian fellowship. “Given my lack of spiritual maturity, I don’t know what choice I would have made if abortion was as easily accessible then as it is today,” Lee reflects. “Yes, there had been an illegitimate and illegal act. But the life inside me was now in the hands of God, and there were no illegitimate births when it was God who created life.”

Although men may commit rape and other hideous crimes, Lee observes, “it’s God who decides when to make life.” Lee later discovered that Ethel Waters, a black gospel singer who was featured at the Billy Graham crusade where Lee pledged her life to Christ, “was the result of her twelve- year-old mother being raped at knife-point in a parking lot. . . . Her mother didn’t volunteer for her, just as I didn’t volunteer for Julie. Both Ethel and Julie were God’s ideas—and He’s the One who gives us worth.”

New Beginnings

Lee was placed under anesthesia when she gave birth to Julie, and was never able to hold or even to see her child. “After the birth, I was passed papers to sign and told only, ‘You had a healthy baby girl,’” she recounts. “I never got to see her. . . . I knew the adoption records were sealed, and that I’d never know whether the county [adoption agency] placed her with a Christian couple, as I’d requested.” With the help of her Christian singles’ group, Lee graduated from Bible college. She became active in organizing Bible conferences and began to write and speak about challenges facing Christian women.

In 1973 Lee met Harold Ezell, whose life had also been touched by tragedy: His first wife had died from cancer, his second wife from a rare blood disease. Lee and Harold were married six months later. Although they could have no children together, Lee developed a loving relationship with Harold’s daughters, Pam and Sandi, and was blessed with an example of what she calls “God’s irony”: “I sat in the same adoption courtroom where Julie’s parents had adopted her and adopted Hal’s girls, Pam and Sandi, as my own! I had given up a precious child for adoption, and God gave me two children to mother. I knew that if God could work things out for me, surely he would work things out for the child I’d given up.”

Julie had found her way into the home of a loving Christian couple, Harold and Eileen Anderson, and learned at age seven that she was an adopted child. Although the news unsettled her, her adoptive mother explained that “it was out of love that my birth mother allowed me to have a home and parents—something she couldn’t provide for me.” “I often wondered who my birth mother was and if I looked like her,” Julie continues. “And I never stopped hoping that she, too, was a Christian.”

Julie Finds Her Birth Mother

In 1984, as a new mother, Julie contacted the Adoptees’ Liberty Movement Association (ALMA), a volunteer organization that helps adopted children search out their birth- mothers. ALMA placed Julie in touch with the Christian family who had provided a home for Lee while she was pregnant. On December 2nd of that year, Lee called Julie, the child she had given up two decades earlier. “Because I thought this might be our only conversation, I was careful not to ask much or make her uncomfortable,” Julie relates. “I told her I had two motivations for trying to find her: to let her know she was a grandmother, and to tell her what Christ had done in my life.”

By this time, Lee had become a best-selling Christian author, syndicated radio host, and highly sought-after motivational speaker, and her husband Hal was the Western Commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service. When Julie and her family flew to Washington, D.C., to meet her birth mother, her husband Bob drew Lee aside and told her, “I would like to thank you for not aborting Julie. That might have been the most convenient thing to do. I just can’t imagine living my life without her—or without my baby.” Lee writes: “I was so grateful no ‘free clinic’ had been available to tempt me those many years ago.”

Defeating the Death Culture

Every Mother’s Day, Julie observes, she thanks “both my mothers, one who gave me the priceless gift of life, and the other who gave me the irreplaceable gift of years of love and teaching.” Through Fortress International, she has learned that “those who gave up a child for adoption say that despite the emotional pain, they know they gave that child the best hope for a good life. But those who aborted babies now plead with pregnant women not to believe the lies that the ‘fetus’ really isn’t a baby, or that abortion and its aftereffects are painless.”

The abortion culture “is entirely built upon lies and deception,” Julie emphasizes. “Those lies have destroyed nearly 40 million pre-born children, and have disfigured the lives of tens of millions more. Three decades after Roe v. Wade, we have to confront the fact that abortion has affected the lives of nearly all of us. It’s very rare to find an American family that has not felt the impact of abortion in some way. So there’s a real challenge confronting those of us who seek to restore respect for life. We have to be willing, first of all, to reach out in unconditional love to women who are either considering abortion or who have made the mistake of allowing their child to be killed by an abortionist. To defeat the culture of death, we must confront it with God’s love.”