By Gretchen Keiser

Jean Staker Garton, and author and lecturer and president of Lutherans for Life, approaches her pro-life work by dismantling the slogans of the opposition.

Phrases like “the right to choose” and “every child a wanted child” sway public opinion against a human life amendment and disguise abortion as “compassion for the less fortunate,” she says. Her fearless dissection of those slogans drew a standing ovation Sunday from several hundred who attended Family Night in Support of Life in Atlanta.

Dr. Garton, who holds a doctorate in literature, compares the use of language in defending abortion to the way words disguised the holocaust in Nazi Germany, the subject of her graduate work. In the introduction to her book, “Who Broke the Baby?”, on the role of language in the abortion issue, she tells the story which led to the title of the book.

Up late at night previewing slides for a pro-life appearance the next day, she was startled when her youngest child came up beside her. He looked at the slide and asked “Who broke the baby?” Dr. Garton began to wonder why so many adults were confused about abortion when it was so obvious to the child.

One example at Sunday’s talk was the compassion implied by the phrase “every child a wanted child,” used by some who argue for abortion.

The phrase implies great concern for children. But, Dr. Garton said, it “says nothing about the child.”

“Unwantedness” measures our emotions and our feelings,” she said. “It tells us nothing about the nine million who have died through legal abortion.”

The slogan also “fails to recognize that there is a big difference between an unwanted pregnancy and an unwanted child,” she said, underlining that there is a distinction between the way women may feel abut a pregnancy, and about the child who is born.

She also said that the phrase does not remind people that “many children are wanted, but for all the wrong reasons” – again emphasizing that the question of whether or not a pregnancy is wanted doesn’t illuminate the life of the child, or the love and care the child may receive.

The slogan really tells us “a great deal about what we have become,” Dr. Garton said.

“The measure of our humanity is what we do with the unwanted,” she said. “Do we kill them or care for them?”

The mother of four children and the wife of a Lutheran clergyman, Dr. Garton had her own “unwanted pregnancy” at the age of 40, when she was looking forward to fewer family responsibilities and work outside her home. In her book’s introduction, she says that she had her baby, since abortion on demand was not legalized at that time. But she decided to work with pro-abortion groups for the legalization. Instead, she found that the group was using terms to deny and downplay the reality of abortion. Dr. Garton set out to find her own basis to defend abortion legitimately. Instead, after “many months of study and research,” she discovered no legitimate way to defend abortion.

Paraphrasing C.S. Lewis’s description of his conversion to Christianity while he was trying to attack it, Dr. Garton says she was “carried kicking and screaming” into the pro-life position “by the sheer weight of the evidence.”

Since then, she has become well-known for her pro-life lectures.

Her talk Sunday was part of an evening sponsored by the Atlanta Pro-Life Action Committee to mark the eighth anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court decision striking down the abortion statues.

“We must decide what kind of society we want,” she said.

“We must first of all care enough…and then we must become compassionately and passionately involved in securing protection through the Human Life Amendment.”

“…We need to realize that we are in the King’s business and stop apologizing for the King.”